


The Man of the Future

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [21]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Book Spoilers, Complete, Cute Kids, Drama, Drug Use, Family Dynamics, Gen, Hairspray reference!, Hoffstetler Lives, Hope vs. Despair, Horror, Lovecraftian, Post-Canon, Post-Movie, Sexual Tension, Sexual Transgression, Spoilers, Tension, Worldbuilding, mediocre quantum physics, or does he?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-03-27 08:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13877352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: When a fairy tale ends, what happens to those left behind in Baltimore?  What else is out there in a world that has Occam's mad science, a river god, a princess without a voice? A tale that needs the POV of its youngest character, Tim Strickland, to be told in full, decade by decade.There's drama, horror, and a streak of that Strickland repulsiveness as Tim tries to unpick the mysteries around his half-remembered father. How Richard Strickland truly died. What, at Occam Aerospace, came between him and Dr. Hoffstettler. The strange attractions of Elisa Esposito. And why Giles Dupont, whatever the year is, still answers his phone.





	1. 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s the America Tim Strickland was promised: jet packs, Commies, and more. In the middle of it, there’s a meetup between a man of the future and a man of the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're at the delightful point in the _Shape of Water_ fandom where we have three canon sources: the film, the art book/art extras, and the del Toro/Kraus official novel. What a time to be alive. This story draws on all three and **contains novel connections/spoilers.**

The main FBI building, in downtown Washington, should have been shut down years ago. The place got less human every year. Outside, the monolith's concrete crumbled at random onto the sidewalk. Inside, in front of the security checkpoints, the foyer had been stripped of its amenities, leaving only concrete and wood Brutalism.

His first time here, decades ago, there’d been leather sofas, a water fountain, courtyard access. Hell, Tim Strickland was so old he remembered _ashtrays_.

Today, the building’s foyer was a holding pen. You weren’t human to the Bureau, the ‘Bu’, until you got through the security gauntlet. Maybe not even then. Other people were getting through while he waited. Administrators. Field agents, cocky young ones, twitchy old ones. DC suits. A cluster of supers and paras went past, hemmed with tech-armored guards in case anyone flexed their extra abilities. Tim yawned. He pulled out his phone while he still had wifi reception.

There were a few alerts. Two caught his eye. Tim tapped one and read. _Amidst late-stage capitalism and its discontents, universities are seeing a resurgence of interest in communism. This socioeconomic catchall, between a theory and a belief system..._ Commies were back? Dad would turn over in his Arlington grave at the thought.

Tim tapped the second link, the one he really wanted to read. _Jealous of your local super-types? Now you can have the fun part._ _Jet packs are about to hit the market. The back-pocket rockets are a new headache for the Federal Aviation Authority. But reduced federal funding means that..._ Hah. Something else his father had been right about.

A fluorescent bulb in the nearest decaying fixture flickered. Tim braced. He forced himself to exhale. He wished there was something alive to look at, a plant or something. His phone screen didn’t help when –-

“Sir, you’re loitering.”

It was one of the armored security guards, nearly faceless behind a helmet. She didn’t help, either. But she was just doing her job: checking out a restless, grim-faced man, tall enough to intimidate by default. One of the twitchy old ones. Wearily, Tim let his ID cards and retina be scanned. The red light in his eye took him that bit closer to –-

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“Their name?”

Tim watched a man his own age pause in front of the revolving door, holding up the flow of people as he read a sign. He reached into a tweed pocket and gazed at his hand like he clutched a miracle. Seeing Tim, he waved, striding over as if the foyer’s lost comforts were still around them. His smooth, vintage-announcer’s voice belled out as he held up a device. “Tim! Is this thing a computer? They say it’s my phone, but I can’t tell them apart anymore...”

Tim pocketed his own phone. “He’s here. Giles Dupont.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. [really is a disintegrating pile of concrete brutalism.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building)
> 
> Supers and paras - I do think a world with a river god in military custody is a world where other interesting and sinister things are happening. Because _The Shape of Water_ is a Del Toro movie, the universes I picture the most overlap with are those of H.P. Lovecraft's dark science fiction-fantasy and Mike Mignola's _Hellboy_. Almost every American fictional 'verse with super-hero types has them coming to prominence on the East Coast of the United States between the 1930s and 1960s. Will this sort of thing show up more in the story? -innocent whistling-


	2. 1962

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Out of the clips and snapshots of childhood memory, Tim remembers a talk with his father, and finding out, two days later, that it was the last talk they’d ever have.

It was strange, the things Tim remembered from his childhood.

The start of their time in Baltimore, that summer when he was eight, was a blur. The Baltimore autumn was like a handful of snapshots. Going to school in a yellow bus, not a military one. Super swell TV shows, different ones, and let’s-pretend games afterwards with Tammy. His mother lively, more beautiful than ever, but also moody, saying _no_ a lot more. His father, joining them when the cool weather and rain began, coming back from one of his missions for the first time in forever.

Tim’s last real conversation with his father was clear in all its dimensions, like an insect in amber. A treasure if you didn’t look too closely: disturbing when you put it under a microscope. Though that would be the opposite of what his father had wanted him to do.

The memory began with Timmy in the gold-and-avocado living room, looking out at the rain. It was raining as hard as it used to when they lived in Florida. That was nice. It felt like home. Behind him he could hear his parents talking, though he could tell, from their voices, he wasn’t supposed to. Dad was using bad language again. He’d been doing that a lot lately.

“Elaine. I am fucking concentrating on work. Push me one more time, and I will –-”

“He’s your son! He needs _you_ to talk to him. There’s things I – I just don’t know about him anymore.”

There was a “hmph.” Then, behind him, Timmy heard his father’s hard shoes, clicking on the kitchen linoleum, muted by the living-room carpet.

“Son. Come out here while I wait for my ride. Your mother says I should talk to you, man to man.”

Timmy forced himself to not run. Once they were on the front step, he couldn’t help bouncing a little. They were sheltered from the rain under the modern door’s lintel. In his dark suit and trench coat, Dad seemed as tall as one of the trees in the yard.

His father jerked a cigarette out of one pocket, and something else, which he passed to Timmy. He rumbled, “Give your old man a light.”

Mom had told them Dad had hurt his hand, and to not ask him about it _. If he_ _’_ _s home from the hospital it must be fine,_ she’d said, with a quiver. But they could tell it still hurt him. Now he was asking Timmy to help.  Breathless, Timmy tried to flick the lighter like Mom and Dad did. It took him two tries, but he managed. He stared in fascination at the flame while his father held his cigarette in it.

His father’s face shed some of its tense lines as he inhaled a first mouthful of smoke. Timmy dared to ask, “Can I try one?”

“You're too young. 'S like liquor and driving. When you're sixteen.” His father inhaled again. Abruptly, he said, “Your mom says you cut up a lizard. Alive.”

Tim bounced in exuberant protest. “Mom said it was gross and I should wash my hands. But, but they did it in school, Dad! They had the big kids’ science teacher come in and he had a frog and he did it to the frog to show us the insides! Everyone thought it was yucky but me and PJ so we got to help. And, and the teacher hooked the frog up to a battery and it was alive again! It was so cool!” He meant both the frog and his success with the tiny lizard, the thrill of seeing their physical life exposed, really knowing about them.

“Well, son. It’s all right to put animals in their place. They’re put on this earth for us to use. Show them who’s in charge. But don’t get too wrapped up in --”  his voice dripped with contempt – “so-called science.”

“But you said you were doing experiments at work too! Amphibious survival. That’s like frogs?”

“That’s right. And that’s how I know. Goddamn scientists, ask too many questions, never get anything done. They drive me crazy. They’re not real men. You understand me, son?”

The phrase _real men_ made Timmy stand up straighter. “Is that like, like men don’t cry?” Or wear certain colors, or use low-class slang (though you could swear), or have to set the table before dinner, that was for girls like Tammy, or – there were a lot of these things, when Dad was around.

Enigmatically, his father said, “I’ll find out soon enough. With Hoffstetler. Find out if he’s a Commie...”

Timmy squirmed with excitement. Dad was keeping bad guys away from the lab, the experiments, where the government was starting the future.

They stood together, watching the rain, for a long moment. Just the two of them, at nightfall.

His father broke the quiet. “You remember what I say. I’m glad somebody in this house does…how old are you now?”

“Eight, but, not really. I’ll be nine soon.” Timmy hopped in place again. “Dad? Do girls still like you if you’re younger than them?”

With the rare lilt that meant something was funny, his father said, “Girls already. Who is she?”

Timmy took a big breath. This was important. “She’s the prettiest girl in the whole world. Tammy thinks so too. She’s Tracey, she’s a dancer on the teevee, on the Corny Collins show. She’s got the prettiest hair and her dresses, they’re all sparkles. And she’s the best dancer of anybody! But,” Timmy hung his head, “She’s a big girl. She’s sixteen and I’m not.”

His father laughed, for real, like he used to, until he coughed on his cigarette. “Trust me, son. When the time comes, you will have – or take - any woman you want.”

Timmy blinked. “Is...is that like getting married?”

His father cough-laughed again, longer. “Close enough.” He leaned out from under the lintel. “Goddamn Fleming. I told him to pick me up early.”

Timmy leaned out, too. “Are you gonna go shoot the bad guys?” That was what his dad did, he knew.

“Absolutely. Already loaded.” His father opened his jacket, slid out a Beretta pistol. He spun it around, cupped neatly in his right hand. Timmy sighed, his happiness complete for that instant.

With his face next to his father’s hands, there was a sweetish-rotten smell. The cigarette smoke had hidden it, before. Not all the gleaming darkness in his father's hands was metal. On the left hand, two of the fingers were shiny, swollen, darkest red, blackening at the tips. Timmy swallowed, and that wasn’t good, it took the putrid scent into his throat. How did Dad wash that hand? _Don't ask him about it._

His father slid the gun back into its shoulder holster, looking to one side. He muttered, “If I’m not here, you’ll be the man of the family.”

“If you have to go on a mission again, you mean?” asked Timmy.

“Mph. Yes.” His father inhaled smoke, exhaled it, staring into the distance. Looking at the future, Timmy thought. “A man does what he has to. When the time comes to survive.”

Before Timmy could ask what that meant, lights flashed in the road. Out in the rain, there was a cool car, with another man driving it. His father dropped his cigarette butt, ground it beneath his heel. This done, he strode away, folding his height to get in the car. It was just like in the TV shows and movies. Lots of times, the hero had a buddy. But you, watching the show, always knew who was really the hero.

Timmy waved. The other man, Dad’s buddy, waved back; his dad didn't. They drove off into the curtains of rain on their mission. He scampered back inside.

Mom had scolded him when he wasn’t asleep at midnight. His brain was too full, thinking about bad guys and animals and whatever _having_ was. There was something dark and powerful to it, like when his father talked about jungles and shooting. Exciting and uncomfortable, at the same time...

He remembered what had happened two days later, too. Half as snapshots, half with that caught-in-amber clarity.

Mom was taking them on a trip and that was great. A day out of school! Mom said they could go to Howard Johnson's for breakfast when they were on the highway, anything they wanted, even ice cream. They got to take their favorite toys, too. But he’d wanted Dad to come too, more than anything. It was important. Last night, before Dad went to work, he’d heard arguing. Mom pleading and Dad using bad language again, yelling. Timmy wanted them to all be together, happy.  But Mom said _no, no,_ and Tammy said _come on_ , and he’d started crying, and gone along without Dad. This way Dad wouldn’t see him crying.

Then they were at a place by the airport, waiting for another car, and Mom had called somebody on the telephone. “Oh, what was I thinking. I can't just -- five more minutes, I have to talk to my work.” But, as Mom did, all the color had drained out of her face. She looked sick, like Dad did when he needed a pain pill. When she was done talking, she made another call. After that, she drifted over to the grimy waiting room sofa, walking right past them to sit down, staring into space.

There had been another grown-up there, but she’d gone away to get coffee. It was just them. Timmy pulled at Tammy’s sleeve. Tammy was two years older than him, tough and bossy, with the best stories for let's-pretend games. The perfect older sister, like Mom had been the most perfect Mom, until a minute ago. “Is Mom okay?”

Tammy hissed, “I didn’t see. Did she take a Miltown?”

“What’s a Miltown? Is it a pain pill?”

Tammy didn’t answer. Instead, she gave him a nudge. “Ask her what’s happening!”

Timmy swallowed. If you didn’t set the table you had to do other things, like take out the garbage. Shoot the bad guys. And this. There was a lot of dirty carpet between him and his mother. Even when he was beside her, she still seemed far away. “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?” Timmy pulled her sleeve. “Moooom?”

“Yes, darling?” She turned to him, as peacefully as if she’d only heard the final ‘Mom.’

“Are we going?”

Mom poised her handbag on her lap. “No. We need to wait for the police.”

Timmy gasped. “Are the police taking us away ‘cause we’re not at school?”

“No, darling. I have to talk to them because – because your father’s died.” And, taking out a handkerchief, she began to cry.

Tim turned to Tammy. She, too, had gone from pink to pale, her hair, still wet from the rain, plastered to her forehead. Like Mom, she looked right through Tim, at something he couldn’t see. Then she gulped, younger than she’d been a moment ago, “Mommy!”

Instantly, their mother opened her arms to her children. Tam flew to one shoulder to choke her sobs there. Mom folded her right arm around Tam. “It’s all right, dearest. It’ll all be all right, now.” She leaned her pretty, tear-stained face to kiss Tam’s wet hair, keeping her left arm open for Tim, too. But he stayed where he was, frozen.

The only thing he could think was that he shouldn’t have cried earlier. Dad had told him not to cry, never again.

 

_Next Chapter - 1973: Giles Dupont._


	3. 1973

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim thinks it’s weird that his sister wants to apologize to the adoptive father of some woman his dad killed. Their dad died, too. But he’ll go along to visit this Giles Dupont. Bonus: A newspaper article about the dire events at a Baltimore dockside in 1962.

It had been a hell of a winter break.  

Tim had come home from college crashing after two weeks of exams and benzedrine. He'd found his room stripped of his albums and posters, sterilized with fresh paint and the damn antiques that crammed the rest of the house. Christmas dinner, Tim had stood up against some old bitch from his stepdad’s side. Like usual, _he_ was the one who was wrong. The day after Christmas, Tammy had announced she was a lesbian. Mom was, like usual, acting like everything was fine before she flipped out. New Year’s Day, it felt like Mom was working up to it: striding around, vigorously cleaning out a closet, their stepfather and his daughter tactfully vanishing after dinner. 

But Mom didn’t chew them out. Instead, she told them, at long last, how Dad had died. “You’re nineteen, a college man now, Tim. And, Tammy, maybe if you know, it’ll help you process.”  

Tim had slumped. “Mom. Stop with the college man gas. It’s uncool.” 

Tammy was enraged. “You could have told me when I was nineteen! We aren’t progressive if we have this internalized sexism, Mom!”   

Mom had just given them one of her looks. Then she’d taken out a newspaper clipping and told a story that had stunned them to silence.  

He and Tammy had spent the rest of the evening chain-smoking on the back porch stairs, freezing their asses off. Periodically, one of them would say, “That was so fucked up.” Whenever Mom came out to check on them, they lied, together. “We’re still talking.”  

Automatically, they put their cigarette butts into a double-wide ashtray. It was a liberal household. You could have a drink, call your stepdad Ross, be a lesbian without being disowned. As long as you had perfect manners. God forbid you ground out a cigarette on the steps of this historic home, their stepfather’s pride and joy, disrespecting its past as a way-station of the Underground Railroad. Yet another reminder of how fucked up their dad’s death had been. Maybe his life, too. 

Tammy was the one who finally said something different. “I hate when Mom’s right about, like, processing. But she’s got a point. I have an idea.” Tim listened carefully. Her idea was crazy, but there was a weird logic to it.  

Tim stubbed out his fifth cigarette. “How will you find him?” 

“I think I know how. If it works, we can go next Sunday. We'll say we're gonna kick it for a fresh scene. Maybe New York. If he's close, like, still in Baltimore," Tammy shrugged, "I'll go back to campus early after. It works if you're in.” 

Tammy was a genius. Tim could do that, too, head back to his own campus. A get-out-of-jail-free card, for a simple price: go with Tammy when she apologized to the man whose daughter had been killed by their father. “I’m so in. If Ross says to me, ‘Let’s have an intelligent conversation, here,’ one more time, I am gonna hurl.” 

“Still my gross little brother, after all these years,” Tammy said. She’d socked him in the arm.  

He’d socked her back. She’d put up her dukes. Squabbling with Tammy felt like getting back to normal. He’d raised his hands, making kung-fu movie noises. She’d jabbed under, tapped his ribs. “Gotcha! You owe me a beer. One out of the fridge doesn’t count.”  

Tim surrendered the second-to-last cigarette in his pack as a down payment. Tim smoked the last one slowly, remembering his father, and the things he'd said that hadn’t turned out to be true. No matter how much Tim wanted them to be.   

Now they were both on a train heading north out of New York, along the western bank of the Hudson river. It was spooky. Tammy had said New York and it'd turned out  to be pretty close. The man had left Baltimore. They had, too, all moving to Delaware when Mom remarried. For now, he and Tammy were each taking up a row of seats on a side of the train, stretching out their athletic angles. On this cold Sunday afternoon, the train car was empty except for them.  

Tim finished flicking through a newspaper. Not much was happening over the holidays. They’d devoted a full page to an editorial: SUPER POWERED INDIVIDUALS: THREAT OR MENACE? He paged through to see if any new “supers” had emerged. Nope. He chucked the paper aside to look out the window. Winter rain was sweeping over the Hudson Valley and the river in great, draping sheets.   

Tammy slid to the end of her row of seats, to be right across from him. “Let me see the article again.” 

Tim didn’t give her the paper. Instead, he unzipped the duffel bag he carried, stenciled STRICKLAND: a piece of his father’s old Army gear. He handed Tammy a folder. Mom had let him have the clipping. By now, he’d memorized it. 

 **MISCEGNATION LEADS TO TRAGEDY**  

 **One Mexican Illegal,** **Three** **Deaths**  

_Three people died at the Fells Points docks in the early morning of October 11th. Behind the violence was a plot to help a Mexican illegal involved in espionage escape from federal authorities._

_The daring plan seemed to be for the Mexican to swim out of Baltimore, eluding arrest using frogman gear. But America’s finest were on the job, albeit under a veil of security. The important operation was led by U.S. Army Colonel Richard Strickland._

_In the final confrontation, both the Mexican and his accomplice, one Elisa Esposito, took multiple shots to their chests. Yet the Mexican managed to slit Strickland’s throat while Strickland paused to reload. As military police and bystanders watched in shock, the Mexican then lifted Miss Esposito’s corpse for a suicide plunge into the water. With the storm and high water levels, their bodies have not been found.  Miss Esposito’s coat was recovered, pierced with bullet holes._

_Colonel Richard Strickland served with distinction in the Korean War and advanced further as a military advisor for American interests overseas. He will be buried with full honors in Arlington Cemetery. He leaves behind a wife and two children. A death from the previous evening, David Fleming, security advisor at Occam Aerospace, is thought to be related. He, as well, leaves behind a widow and children._

_Miss Esposito was a white woman, a janitor at Occam Aerospace, remarkable only for being a lifelong mute. It is speculated that this handicapping condition made her vulnerable to manipulation. Her involvement with the Mexican, a member of the ‘brown races’, was in direct contravention of Maryland state anti-miscegnation laws. A man who identified himself as Miss Esposito’s adoptive father, one Giles Dupont, was at the scene. He confirmed their involvement and has been held for questioning._

_All these circumstances give weight to the authorities’ final statement. “This duplicitous conduct is typical of both the spy and the Latin. It is why miscegenation continues to be legally discouraged. In these troubled times we all need to place America first.”_

There were no photographs. 

Tim knew that, on the back of the clipping, there was a gout medicine ad and the start of another article.  

 **Fed Up Owner Says: Hoodlums, Stay Out Of** **Sandboys** **Quarry!**  

_Bob Stracyzinskyi, the man who keeps Baltimore’s beaches sandy and golden, has had enough. He wants the public to know that Sandboys Quarry is now under 24-hour security watch. After a startling mob shootout at his quarry on October 10th, where two corpses and a severely injured man were…_

Tammy handed it back. “Thanks. No wonder it took Mom so long to tell us. All that prejudice, maybe anti-civil rights stuff, under the censorship. And then finding out that, afterwards, Mom wasn’t away during the days doing stuff for Dad’s funeral after all, but getting grilled by the FBI and army intelligence.” She shook her head.

“Is that why we’re apologizing to this Dupont guy, and not the other way around? We lost our dad.” At the same time, this guy had seen his dad in action. Tim couldn’t do anything but meet him. 

Tammy said, “What if it was me that got shot, doing a civil rights thing, and Dad was alive?” 

Tim didn’t have any response to that. His sister went on. “The guy Dad shot, maybe there was something there. But a cleaning lady? He could have just arrested her.” Tam shook her head. “That’s violence against women.”  

Trust Tammy to take the side of some chick she hadn't met. Tim said, “I can’t believe they thought a women's college would make you into a lady. More like you showed them by getting _into_ the ladies.” 

Tammy smiled. “No, before that. Tracy Turnbladt. Remember we spent a whole summer arguing over who was going to marry her when we grew up?” 

Tim grinned back. It was 1973. Being mellow was now. “Who says we stopped? I think I’m gonna win this one. Hippy.”  

“Preppy.” 

“Dyke.” 

“Freak.”  

Tim clammed up and slid back to his window. She didn’t know the half of it.  

Tammy snorted. “Why are _you_ sore? You can dish it out but you can’t take it?” 

That brought Dad back again. “I don’t wanna be a preppy.”  

“Hate to break it to you, we’ve been preppies ever since Mom married Ross Winthrop Glasscock.”  

Tim winced. Mom had gone all in on a new life after Dad died, working at that ad agency, getting swept off her feet by a pharmaceutical executive. Still, why hadn’t Mom _thought_ before changing their last names when she remarried? High school with the last name Glasscock had been hell.  

“It’s not like I’m in a frat at college. Need a decent GPA for that.” Tim hunkered down in his seat further, shaking his shaggy hair over his brow. “I’m not smart enough for that place. I’m only there ‘cause Ross pulled strings. Everyone else wants to go to grad school, take over the world. I still need to figure out a major.” He’d thought a lot of his old promise to Dad that he’d join the army. But nothing had been simple since Dad died. Even he could see that the war in Vietnam had no good guys.  

“All you talk about is being on the swim team,” Tammy said. 

Tim shrugged. “That’s the part I’m good at. Wish Sarah was at one of the schools nearby. I survived senior math ‘cause of her. She could, I dunno.” Sarah was at school in Florida. Marine biology. If that meant she was kind of hung up on the past, when her mom had died in a boating accident, well, Tim could dig that.  

Tammy tossed her head back, eyes flashing. “Help? Like you were trying to help her at Christmas? It’s not high school any more. Bullying other people doesn’t make it better for her!” 

Tim kicked the seat in front of him. “Goddamn Christmas dinner and that bitch from Ross’s side was hassling her about the freshman fifteen, wanting her on diet pills.” Sarah was the only person who made him feel...normal. She, too, had a dead parent who nobody talked about, more memories overshadowed by Mom and Ross marrying. Things that Mom said were gross, like turning over a rock to see the critters underneath, had been okay when Sarah did them. “Why didn’t you stand up for her?”  

Tammy sliced her hand through the air. “If you hadn’t made it a bad scene we would’ve handled it. I talked with her later. We’re sisters. That’s what we do.” 

“Sarah’s...” Smarter than ever, freckled and glowing from Florida sunshine, carrying her freshman fifteen in all the right places and, goddamn it. He had to pull the duffel bag over his lap. He was a freak, he was absolutely fucked. “My stepsister, too. But fine. Girl talk. This our stop?” 

It was. There was, luckily, one taxi, sleepy in the rain. Tam gave the address: Serpentine Avenue, Tuxedo Village. 

They drove along winding suburban roads, circling a lake. “It’s really pretty here,” Tam said, surprised. 

The cab started taking them up into the hills around the lake. They went past Tudor-style Victorians, Gothic mansions made of schist. Tim frowned. “If he lives out here now why was his daughter a cleaning lady?” 

Tammy sniffed. “He’s gotten well known as an artist. Sometimes that takes a while.” 

“Uh-huh. _Now_ the art history major tells me why we’re doing this big production.”  

“It isn’t! Not the only reason. It’s what helped me find him. I called my advisor and she knew someone who knew his New York gallery and – we’re here.”  

The house they pulled up to was less lavish than most of the ones they passed. It was still a three-story Victorian, white picked out with forest green, windows glowing against the rain-dark winter trees. Tammy airily told the cabbie to wait for them. She’d gotten used to being Ross Winthrop Glasscock’s stepdaughter pretty fast when that made them well off, Tim reflected.  

Tammy strode up the steps like she’d been there before. Tim followed, easily carrying both his duffel and her suitcase. The doorknocker was shaped like a fish. When she knocked, the door opened right away.  

Tim raised his eyebrows for the voluptuous silhouette, framed in golden light, that greeted them. _Hel_ _-_ _lo, Mrs. Robinson,_ he thought. When he came close enough to see the woman for real, she turned out to be black. She gave Tim such a look, between horror and anger, that it felt like she’d read his mind. A tiny dog dashed between him and the woman, yapping frantically. Tim slunk back behind his sister.  

Their hostess and her pet, together, were body-blocking the living room. It looked more comfortable than their living room in Delaware, fewer antiques, softer sofas, a TV with the football game on, agreeably loud. Tim peered in. A black man was stretched out on a Barca-Lounger. When he saw Tim, he jolted upright.  

The woman cleared her throat, looking up at them. “You’re the Stricklands, I can tell.” Tim’s gut went hollow. It had been years since they'd been called that. “Giles said you can go on up. Up those stairs, there,” she said, gesturing. She scooped up her growling puppy, bipped it on the nose with one finger. “Shush, Pom Pom.”  

On the stairs, Tammy glanced back at her brother. “Is she the housekeeper, or is this house, like, apartments? Like in a city?” Tim shrugged. The stairwell’s wood-paneled walls and alcoves were full of art of all kinds. On the second story landing, a tabby cat peered at them, then slipped through a set of wooden double doors, cracked open. Hesitant, Tammy knocked a second time. “Mister Dupont?” 

A smooth man’s voice rang out. “Come in! Sorry I wasn’t downstairs – I was in the middle of something – " Tammy went first. Tim caught that she gasped a little. When he followed, he stayed stuck in the door, himself.  

The room was wild. A real trippy pad, like something out of a magazine, packed to the rafters. With Op Art and antiques, drafting tables and easels, plants and bookcases and statues. The lights themselves were a mix of warm mica-shaded lamps and chrome drafter's spots. Out of old and new, the sense of the old won out, like being inside a hyper-detailed drawing by that genius, Robert Crumb. The man's own drawings were everywhere, mostly nudes, so warm and alive they made Tim shift the duffel bag in front of his crotch again. There were large abstract canvases, too, streaked as if by luminous rain, populated by ethereal figures: slender women, swimming men. The end of the room was a series of windows, framing the rain-swept lake. Cats drifted through the chaos. There was so much weird shit here, all shapes and sizes, that Tim didn’t feel out of place.  

It took a minute to focus on the man in the middle of it all. Putting down a palette and paintbrush to greet them, Giles Dupont was white, and as tall as the two siblings. Extra paintbrushes were tucked above each of his ears. He had the face of someone who'd adopt a mute orphan, Mr. Rogers’ cardigan and vibe, with a full head of tawny hair, just starting to go silver to match his beard. About fifty-seven, Tim thought. Old, man. 

He saw Tammy and smiled, wide and natural. Most men did. “How do you do, Miss Strickland? I was worried about today. But you look like an angel. Or, no, Joan of Arc.” Tammy was slim and blonde, like Mom, but with stronger features. Her long bob flipped into slight wings naturally. She was dressed up: a camel cape over a red turtleneck, bell-bottoms, and a big silver necklace. The feminist women’s symbol.  

Tim bit back a grin waiting for Tammy to snap at the old guy. But she didn’t. “Tam is fine, thank you. Tamara Caldwell. My mom remarried and – and I’m going to take her maiden name.” Tim started. Since when?  

“Ah! A fine tradition in its own right, choosing a new name. I did it myself in my younger days. Please do call me Giles. And this young man is?” 

Tam said, hastily, “My brother, Tim.” Giles gave him an up-and-down look, a terse nod. Tim stayed where he was, in the doorway. Tam went on. “I’m at college, senior year at Bryn Mawr, and my brother’s at – ” 

Tim interrupted. “’School near Boston.” He made a _cool it_ gesture with his hand at Tam. She huffed and turned back to Giles.  

Tam took a little breath, just like Mom did, before launching into her speech. This was it. Tim stood up straight. Giles shot him a worried look. Tim tucked his hands behind his back. It wasn’t his fault he was six foot three, with hands like shovels.  

Tam began, stiff and stilted. “I’m here today because of some history that we share. Ten years ago there were some unfortunate events involving my father and your family. I know that my father shot your daughter. A woman like me if my life had been different, maybe. I don’t believe in violence and war. I’m very sorry about what happened and I wish there could have been a peaceful resolution.” 

It sounded like a lecture to Tim. But the old guy bought it. “Thank you. Thank you very much. It was very hard to see that happen to someone I love.” Giles took off his glasses to dash at his eyes, sniffing. Tim cringed. 

Tam said, “I’m so sorry.” She stepped up and clasped Giles’ tear-dampened, paint-marked hand in two of hers.  

Cats wove around them. The tabby reached up to Tam’s knee. “They like you,” Giles said. “No, Lily. Down. She’s a guest.” 

Tam released him to sweep up the tabby cat and pet it, letting it cover her in shed fur. Giles patted the cat, too, affection linking them for a moment. They could have been a medieval engraving, some old-time grooving on peace and forgiveness, if not for Giles’ Mr. Rogers sweater.  

Tam asked, “Do you have a picture of your daughter?” 

Giles looked older, suddenly. “They only left me one.” 

Tam blinked. “What do you mean?” 

“Ah. The whole affair was not without consequences. As part of them, they confisticated my drawings of her and her friend.” It was the first time he’d sounded bitter and angry. Tim kind of liked him better for it.  

Tam asked, “Who’s they? Who took them?” 

Giles shrugged. “The FBI, probably. The paperwork they left me, Zelda’s filed it somewhere. We moved up here soon afterwards. All I have from then is this.” 

He dug around in a battered oak desk and pulled out a pad, flipped it open. One sheet of it had a black-pencil sketch like something from the _New Yorker_ ; a profile of a thin, sharp woman with a pageboy. She was turned with a smile, like someone had asked her to dance. The bottom of the paper was wrinkled from water. 

After the woman downstairs and the other drawings, Tim was both relieved and disappointed that she wasn’t his type. Tam was as thrown off as he was. “She looks...old-fashioned.” 

Giles chuckled. “The world’s changed so much in ten years, hasn’t it? We were a little behind the times, the two of us, even back then.” 

Tim was leaning in to see. He asked, “Was she nice?”  

“I’d say she was sweet as pie, except having her around was more like dinner than dessert. Sustaining. For all the things she did, she never wanted to hurt anyone. Quite the contrary.” Giles plucked off his glasses, cleaned them on a rag. “The poor child had been hurt enough.” 

Tam asked, “What you did, was there a civil rights thing behind it?” 

“Sounds more Cold War stuff to me,” Tim said. 

Giles hemmed and hawed. “I’m a free man right now but I can’t really discuss it. Again, the FBI and suchlike. Like you, I’m, you’d say into peace. The civil rights movement and all that. People’s right to live. However different they are. Different races, homosexual -- ” 

“Oh!” Tam breathed.  

Giles twisted his hands together. “I hope I haven’t offended you?” 

“No, no, it’s – I agree. I absolutely agree. Thank you.” Tam beamed at him. Giles beamed at her. Then she looked at the art, the nudes Tim had clocked right away. “This is all amazing, up here. I love art but I’m just terrible at it. But I’m double majoring in art history and archaeology and...”  

After she’d burbled on for a while, Giles offered, “Is there something you’d like to see up close?” 

She said, “Maybe a restroom?”  

“Of course. The lady of the house will show you where downstairs. It’s rather tidier there.”  

After Tam had nipped out, Giles turned to Tim. Warily, he said, “You’re a quiet, er, young man. Very like your father.” 

“Mom says that a lot.” Like this man, she didn’t seem very happy about it. 

“Good of you to ask about Elisa.” 

Tim shrugged, mumbled, “People die and everyone else...stops talking about them.”  

Giles said, warmly, “Oh, not in this house. We never stop. What about you? Do you draw?” 

“Uh, no. I like drawings better than photos though. Underground comix and stuff.”  

“Well! I could’ve used a lot more people like you, ten years ago. But then, I might not be here.” 

Encouraged, Tim pulled out the article. “This whole thing – with the frogman gear – and the lab place – was this a cover up?” It was too freaky. Something wasn't right.

Giles took a step back. “I suppose you have to be smart if you’re at school in, ahem, Boston.” 

Tim rolled his eyes. “I’m not at Harvard.” 

“MIT?” Tim shook his head.  

“Ah. The _other_ one. I remember hearing a good deal about that one in the Twenties. Well before your time.” 

“This was a cover up,” Tim pressed, flourishing the article. “Was the frogman stuff like, super-science gear?” 

Giles waved his hands, brows crumpling. “Oh, no, no. Nothing like that.”  

“If it wasn’t, why didn’t you stop them? From breaking the law and all?”  

The question gave the old man his courage back. “Sometimes, there’s what’s right or wrong. And sometimes, there’s just...what’s ours. Like Elisa, and like him.”  

Tim froze. That had been the kind of thing Dad said.  

Giles went on. “With your father, Strickland, I didn’t stop him at first because he knocked me out.” 

Tim gaped. “What?” 

“That final night, when he caught up to us on the docks. I guess I can talk about this if it was in the article. Your father had his gun in his right hand, and just – pow. I was down. I only came around for the last part.” 

Tim felt oddly light. “My dad knocked you out.” 

“I was concussed for a week,” Giles said. 

“Yeah! Uh. Sorry.” Tim’s face went hot. He needed to backtrack, say something intelligent-conversation-ish. “Maybe it wasn’t...personal.” 

Giles opened his mouth, then sighed deeply. “Oh, it would have been. If he’d known everything...it most definitely would have been.” 

Before Tim could ask any more, the sound of women’s chatter, girl talk, came from downstairs. 

“Ah. They’re ready. I’ll come with you. See you out,” Giles said, slowly heading for the stairs, cats weaving around him. Tim could tell when he was being shut down. The cab was waiting outside. Giles chatted to the cats all the way down the stairs. The woman was still there, her guard a little relaxed around Tam.  

On the train back to New York, it was dark. Tam – Tamara, gotta remember that - was quiet for a long time herself. She had the river view, this time. Turned to it in profile, she did look like an angel, someone with a higher purpose. Two stops along, she said, “Thanks for coming. And for not getting, like, heavy.” 

“‘S cool. That house was wicked.” Tim felt satisfied, somehow. He was right. There had been some cover up. He still didn’t know what had really happened, but he’d find out. And he had some of his own ideas, now. 

Tam turned forwards, still absorbed in their afternoon. “He had such a vibe. Just...cosmic. Zelda was nice, too. The housekeeper-manager lady.” 

“The one downstairs.” The one who’d seen through him and hated him on sight. Tim slid over to a window again.  

“The bathroom downstairs was neat. Full of plants and fish art. I loved all that Greek stuff he had upstairs. Was it me or is he gay?” 

Tim shrugged. “You sound like Ross. That guy says Abraham Lincoln was gay. They wouldn't let him adopt a kid if he was queer."

Tam couldn't argue with that. After a quiet moment, Tim ventured, "Didn’t know you were gonna change your last name.”

“I love Ross, he’s been great to us. But I don’t want _Glasscock_ on my diploma.” 

“’S cool.” If Tam could change her last name to Mom’s, he could change his to Dad’s. It would put a sliver of difference between him and Sarah, too. That was the only thought he was going to allow himself about her. Dad had said, way back, something about having any woman, but he hadn’t pictured this. Ross _would_ disown him. Giles’ crazy pad had given him a thread to hang on to, a glimpse of other turn-ons out there.  

More, he had an idea of what to do with himself. Giles had mentioned the FBI a couple of times. That was it. That was how to do the next level of what Dad had done, without being part of the stupid Vietnam war. It might even get him out of the draft. Being at that college was finally good for something. Maybe there’d be scholarships, like the ROTC people had, so he wouldn’t have to have Ross pay tuition. “Hey, Tam? Who is it that does the stuff at crime scenes? Like, the ones who took Giles’ art. Archaeologists?”  

“Close. Anthropologists. Forensic anthropology, they call it.” 

“Cool.” And there was his major. He’d actually survived Anth 101. 

He glanced over at Tam. She was still away in her own thoughts. He wouldn’t say anything yet. The quiet was good. He’d had enough intelligent conversation to last him for weeks. But when it came up, he’d say: how bad could the FBI be, if they could let an okay old guy like Giles go for cooperating?  

Back in New York, he felt all right enough to buy that beer he owed Tam. Burgers, too, at a dive bar by Grand Central Station. They clinked bottles with their usual after they’d pulled something off: “Don’t tell Mom or Ross.” It felt like the last time the two of them would say it. Tamara Caldwell, her brother felt, was ready to do her own thing. 

He was still warmed up for the trudge, through the cold and slush, to the out-of-state trains at Penn Station. There, Tam went to Philadelphia, where she’d catch the local to Bryn Mawr. Tim went up to Boston to catch his own local, out to Miskatonic.  

 

_Next: 1984 - Doctor Hoffstetler._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art book reference here - their relocation to Tuxedo in upstate New York is based on something Giles always wanted to do, according to his art book profile. See also a previous story of mine, [Cross and Crown.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13716882)
> 
> Me to Zelda: Zelda, ma'am, is that Brewster or Duane on the Barca-Lounger there?  
> Zelda to me: You don't get to ask me questions like that. You're the one who sent those meddling kids to my house. Hmph!
> 
> Miskatonic = Here's our first touch of H.P. Lovecraft.
> 
> It's worth noting that I'd place this entire story somewhere between "happy ending" and "not _the_ darkest timeline."
> 
> When I was posting this I accidentally typed "1873" for a chapter and now I'm wondering: was that a prompt?


	4. 1984

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim Strickland’s life as an FBI field agent is disrupted when he’s assigned to secure a valuable human asset: one Dr. Hoffstetler. _Bonus_ : the publicly-stated scientific stance on _homo piscis_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chapter of '80s tropes, action, and dark turns. Just sayin'.

Tim had been smoking and shooting the shit in the field agent’s bullpen. All of them on the edges of their seats, between nicotine and being in D.C., where the action was.

The intercom had crackled. A rich baritone said, “Strickland? Come on up. Assignment for you. Get ready to go Ivy League.”

Tim had carried through and changed his last name though –-

“Lucky day, _Dick_ land. College girls!” The waiting agents guffawed, parted for the man who’d said it. “I could go for that. But I’m guessing a brother like me ain’t the patrician type.”

Tim turned to his usual operations partner, hot and uncomfortable. “Dumb reason to break up the band. Guess it’s an easy one if it’s a one man op.”

Destin shrugged. “We’re S-Special Agents now. Stands for Senior and stands for The Shit, as in, we’re the ones they put in it.” More laughter. Destin held up his hand for a high five. He and Tim smacked their palms together. “Get outta here so you can come back.”

Tim went up to the office of their Agent-in-Charge. Amidst an avalanche of paperwork, Griffin spun in his desk chair, dark and stocky, an owl compressed into a classic FBI button-down and tie. “Good news. You get to be you for this one. You went to Miskatonic University. Still know the campus? Anthropology buildings?”

“Yyyyyeah,” Tim said, warily.

Griffin threw down a black assignment folder. He plunked a set of keys on top. “You get the good car.”

The good car meant some kind of trouble. Tim sat on the opposite side of Griffin’s desk to rifle through the folder materials.

Griffin said, “Sending you back to school. You’ll be at an academic conference, keeping an eye on one Doctor Robert Hoffstetler.”

That name rang a bell. Griffin continued. “He’s one of the world’s top codebreakers and astrobiologists – and a former Russian spy. Defected from Russia twenty-odd years back. Ours since then, but never been too happy about it. His owners - don't ask who - are shifting his security from the CIA to the 'Bu. That's so he doesn’t get any ideas about getting out of the country.” Griffin smirked at this cutting shard of agency politics. "The two of you are off to the International Astrobiology Symposium at your old stomping grounds.”

Tim slouched. “What could _possibly_ go wrong with talking about fucking aliens at fucking Miskatonic?” It was like having a midnight picnic in Area 51 or going on a sea cruise to the Bermuda Triangle.

Griffin pointed at him. “You’re on it. You’re his minder. Make sure he gets back to Baltimore. Show them the ‘Bu can do the job.”

Baltimore... “Yes. Sir.”

“Figure you’ll get on like a house on fire.” Griffin chuckled richly. “Well, like somethin’ on fire.”

Five days and a recon of the Miskatonic campus later, Tim cruised into Baltimore in a charcoal-gray Trans Am. Though it was early October, raining slightly, it was warm enough that he stuck one arm out the window. The rich-dick car, an aloha shirt, his six-foot-plus height – all this and more would keep him and this Hoffstetler _noticed_ at the conference. Good luck sneaking off, Hoff. 

Tim drove to the pickup point in his orders. It was freaky to pull up to Occam Aerospace Laboratories. The building's concrete had sucked in every molecule of Baltimore grime for thirty years. Dad hadn’t died here, but...he wondered what Hoff could know about it.

This gig had Tim thinking about his father more than he had in months, maybe years. At the beginning, it had been a good thing that being a field agent was awesome in and of itself. It hadn’t opened the door to finding out more about his dad’s death. He’d been told he should have joined the CIA, the NSA, Army intelligence despite ‘Nam – there were a dozen intelligence groups. Whatever his father had done had fallen into some crack between them all.

Tim revved past Occam’s shabby security checkpoint, braked abruptly in front of an entrance. The souped-up Trans Am was all that and a bag of chips. Civilians wouldn’t see anything like it for years. It did everything but talk: automated steering, rear flamethrowers, passenger seat arm handcuffs, pop-out bumper and side spikes, and a radar phone.

Tim picked up the phone. For this assignment, he was allowed one on-job personal call. Good to get it in before the action began. His last assignment had sucked up three months of his life. After that absence he’d had to call five of the ladies in his black book before scoring. He was losing his touch. Thirty and all that. He’d left the black book and its interchangeable women behind. None of those numbers stuck in his memory. He called one that did.

She wasn’t there. By reflex, he tensed his hips at the chirp of her voice, until the answering machine beeped for his message. “Heyyyyyy Sarah. It’s Tim. I’m in Baltimore. But for, like, five minutes. Get this, I am talking to you from a car. On the phone. A _phone_ in a _car_. Starting the future. You there? Or at work at the aquarium? Saw the new building for it on the drive up, it looks radical. You need me to beat up any fish, or boyfriends, let me know. I’m...on a work trip. Another one. You know how that is. Tam’s falling off a mountain somewhere and MomandRoss are doing their anniversary. So...if my trip is, like, a thing, tell Mom and Tam I love them.” His voice roughened. “And you. Always you. Kaybye.” 

Tim placed the angular phone down, carefully. Damn it. He should be over this. He was a freak, he was absolutely --

There was a hard rap on the passenger’s side window. Tim jerked around to see a little old guy in a hornburg hat standing there. He’d knocked on the car's glass with the metal head of his cane. Tim leapt out.

In the file photos, Hoffstetler had looked mournful. Standing there, he was blazing with stubbornness, eyes intense, lips pressed into oblivion. A foot shorter than Tim, he hunched slightly, leaning heavily on a cane. He did look the part of a secret-agent academic. Eyeglasses, hair drastically striped gray and darkest brown, a scarred cheek defiantly clean-shaven, an immaculate three-piece suit. Tim remembered his father vividly, immediately, because this man smelled like the past - the clean part of it: rain-dampened wool, and camphor, and too many cigarettes. He couldn't imagine his father crumpling into age like this. _When could he ask Hoffstetler?  
_

Hoffstetler spoke first, with distaste. “I’m told you are...Tim Strickland.”

 _Pissed at the FBI downgrade_ , Tim thought. “That’s right. How ‘bout I get your bags, Doc?” Tim weighed them as he lifted them. One was heavy. He flicked out a tool and jimmied open the locks of both suitcases. One was packed with pressed clothing and starched shirts wrapped in tissue paper, the other with books and journals. The books, a strange assortment, were noted in Hoffstetler’s profile. He hauled them everywhere, probably part of a code project. Tim flipped through everything, feeling the cases for false bottoms or sides, running a small gadget over them. They checked out. He snapped the bags shut again. Hoffstetler was watching him, appalled. _Not for a while._

He opened the car door, gently detaching Hoffstetler’s cane. “Need a hand getting in? The car’s kind of low.”

“Fitting,” Hoffstetler said. Slowly, excruciatingly, he settled into his seat. Tim waited, with the manners drilled into him as a cranky teen, for Hoffstetler to be still before shutting his car door.

Inside the car, Tim tried a good-cop smile. “I read your file. For the drive, I got us,” – Tim held up a pair of cassette tapes – “Some classical. Wagner. _The Valkyrie_.”

Again Hoffstetler raked him with those burning eyes. “An apt choice. A warrior defies the gods to defend two lovers. She succeeds, at the price of being imprisoned...”

Tim fired up the ignition. “Bummer. But I guess that’s opera, Doc.” He slid the first tape in.

“ _Doctor_ Hoffstetler. Protocol.” The music underlined his statement with a tense thrum.

Hoff – no, Hoffstetler, if Tim thought it he’d say it - took out a file of notes. He said, with weary surrender, “If you are to accompany me in a convincing fashion, I must tutor you on my research. How long do we drive?”

Tim turned down the music. Its tension was relentless. “Five hours.” In this car, speed limits applied to other people.

“That will suffice.”

Tim waved at the Occam security guy letting them out. Reaching down, he thumbed a tablet of mint gum out of a pack: he was trying, half-heartedly, to stop smoking. Thirty and all that. He held the pack out. “Gum?”

“No thank you. And I would prefer that you did not, as well.”

Around the gum held in his teeth, Tim muttered. “You sound like my mom.”

“You look like your father.”

The Trans Am’s tires squealed for an instant before Tim recovered, braking. The music unfurled into a fusillade of drums.

“You knew him.” It wasn’t a question.

Hoffstetler let the moment stretch, the music smooth out once more, before he spoke.

“It’s a green light.” He tapped the notes in his pale, age-twisted hands. “Let us begin. What do you know of the theory of chance and chaos?”

* * *

At the conference, Tim made sure they were glued at the hip. His job was pure and simple: to be there every second, noting who talked to Hoffstetler. Hoffstetler reacted to this by cycling through silent withdrawal, piercing yet opaque ripostes about Tim's father, and scientific absorption. He was not a drinker. No taking an edge off or loosening up. The only thing that undid him was the conference's ideas. But, whenever he realized he'd slipped into real conversation with his warden, he would retreat anew.

Tim kept a glaze of politeness in place and ground his teeth at night. He hadn't known he was so angry at being denied his father, that a short job with an acquaintance who wasn't talking would push him like this. But he'd had a lifetime between the loss and being here. FBI training at Quantico. Miskatonic. His stepfather talking at him in the car, things he'd taken in and realized years later. Where, along the way, had he heard that a hunter didn't chase and scare, they learned and waited? He wanted to track that back to his dad. If Hoffstetler opened up, he felt, he could do it for sure. He'd know.

Miskatonic University's campus was not what it seemed. All the postcards were of the historic Lower Campus, crammed into a few blocks of a quaintly dark riverside town. Outside of town, beyond Hangman's Hill, a few older buildings formed the nucleus of the modern Upper Campus. The conference was at the Upper Campus. The scale of the place, its plains of lawn between experimental modern buildings, helped keep Hoffstetler in line. He refused to use a wheelchair, and there was a lot of real estate to cover, tiring him out. 

During talks and meals, Tim picked out the other intelligence types. There were a lot of them. CIA, NSA, military intelligence. Tim’s official line, when he ran into someone he knew, one way or another, was that this was amazing. He was thinking about grad school. He wanted to talk more but Dr. Hoffstetler needed some help, you could see that, with the cane. The intelligence types understood. They had to go help their, uh, colleagues too...

That was how Tim was there when Hoffstetler got the offer.

It was during the afternoon coffee break on the last day of the conference. Tim let it happen behind his back. A Miskatonic professor and a grad student (a real one, Tim caught calamari pizza on his breath) inviting Hoffstetler to a lab to see an experiment – an inter-dimensional portal. They were trying to be on the down-low, but as they explained, they got excited. Towards the end, the professor raised his voice. “The calculations are working about half of the time! Well...37.24%. The sample size, so far, is ten attempts.”

Tim turned around. “Could be cool. Where is it?”

“The Trof,” said the grad student.

Tim made affable noises until they separated. Then, he growled in Hoffstetler’s ear, “That’s a heads up. It’s in the Trofendorf Ancillary. Whatever they’re doing, it’s been bunkered.”

After four days, all Hoffstetler had to do was raise one eyebrow. Tim went on. “The Trof is one of the newer buildings that we called the Bunkers. On the edge of the woods. They put things out there to keep them out of the way.”

Hoffstetler raised the other eyebrow. “Things.”

“Weird shit and freshmen.” The Trof bunker was next to Tim's former freshman dorm. Miskatonic’s crackpot experiments got warehoused there: attempts at time machines, slingshot satellite launches, you name it. Maybe one in a hundred worked. You got pretty good at fire drills if you lived in the dorm next door.

“Then they expect to succeed....well? We are staying here tonight, for my frail old bones. Am I to be allowed to attend?” Hoffstetler did not waste any energy trying to persuade. After twenty supervised years, he simply waited.

It was a good-cop moment at last. A wedge to create a little _quid pro quo_ , get Hoffstetler talking. Tim considered the scientist’s 37.24%, diluted by the Trof’s one-in-a-hundred. “Yeah, we’ll do it. I want us secure by twenty-two hundred hours. You want to talk to them afterwards, bring ‘em back to the inn for drinks, snacks, whatever.”

Hoffstetler sighed. “Very well. Let us return to our room. I will freshen up before I go.” Since the only time Tim let the guy alone was in the bathroom of their suite at the alumni inn, Hoffstetler had become fastidious. Tim had the sense he was like that anyway.

Inside the close quarters of their room, despite their tension, they had worked out how to move around each other. While Hoffstetler ran, then took, his second bath of the day, Tim did a quick weapons check. He decided against a wire. Whoever was going through his tapes from this conference was going to suffer enough. Besides, this was at the edge of protocol. His last preparation was to flick open a prescription bottle and flick out two uppers. Good clean stuff, same as they gave to the troops in Vietnam, official-issue wake-and-stake pills. Tonight, with the conference breaking up, was the riskiest night. He could sleep after delivering Hoffstetler tomorrow.

Hoffstetler emerged from the bathroom with terrible timing, right as Tim was putting the pills in his mouth. Tim brazened it out, swallowed, pocketed the rest. “Ready to rock and roll?"

"Yes. Yes, I am," he said, looking more bemused than distasteful, this once.

As Hoffstetler pulled on his suit jacket, Tim said, "I can call security to get us over there. It’s a long walk, but they’ve got golf carts.”

Hoffstetler recoiled at _golf carts_. “We will walk.”

It was a perfect autumn night, brilliant with moonlight. When cold, crisp air filled Tim’s lungs, the uppers kicked in perfectly. Each Miskatonic cranny and shadow vibrated with meaning. Damn if this didn’t feel exactly like a finals period, benzedrine and all. “I’ll take you through the science buildings. Cool stuff in there.” It was also heated. Hoffstetler was trembling with the cold.

They detoured to a long series of modern concrete buildings, from Art Deco to ‘50s Brutalist, linked against the Massachusetts cold by a central walkway. Inside, the path expanded and contracted as they moved from building to connector. It was all linked by dark railings against mint-green walls, and a floor of black granite tiles with small white accents. Heavy glass cases and exhibit stands marched along the center.

Tim paused them at a case of huge mineral chunks and spars. Crystals of selenite and fluorite, asbestos and arsenic, platinum and uranium ores. To Tim, their details sparkled, almost alive, like they’d grow and lengthen any moment. He heard himself saying, “I took rocks for jocks ‘cause of this display. Some of the rocks at the end are fluourescent in black light, and some, they just glow on their own. Freaky.”

Hoffstetler stopped for a thorough read of the next case: BEWARE THE SCIENCE HOAX. Cards and reproduction artifacts scathingly debunked Piltdown Man, the Kensington Runestone, _homo piscis_. He lingered longest, with an enigmatic tilt to his mouth, in front of the _homo piscis_ engraving, showing a dissected Victorian merman. “They say this specimen came from Africa. Interesting. During the Devonian, Africa and South America were joined together, with one great river at their heart. Until continental drift tore the Amazon and the Congo apart.”

“Read to the end. The whole fish-man thing was faked by some colonialist asshole obsessed with West African divers. He died in an asylum.”

Suddenly, Hoffstetler's sharp regard was on him. "You have an interest: you were a student here. Why did you not go further with these studies?"

Potential answers flickered through his mind with ampthetamine-exam speed. _Gross mean to animals did it wrong not a real man not the plan never smart enough._ None were correct. He snapped like a teenager. “What can I say, I'm not perfect.” He could feel the retort sucking his IQ lower as he said it.

But Hoffstetler actually smiled. "Perfection is never where we begin." He tapped his cane on the floor. “Since we will be with colleagues – share what you do know.  What’s the quantum theory around this experiment?”

Tim inhaled. The five-hour lecture in the car fast-forwarded in his mind. “The physics around the smallest bits of space and time – quantum mechanics - has randomness built in. Chaos. They’re trying to use that. They wanna open up on a dimension that’s got something going on. To find that they’re running a portal with micro-differences in the calculations each time, getting differences in there on purpose. You called it the butterfly effect. Like, a butterfly flaps and that movement changes a tornado later on.”

Hoffstetler was holding his breath, lips tight.

“You also said the butterfly effect wasn’t the main part despite, like you said, ‘the technically inept popularity of Ray Bradbury.’ What’s important is the random attractor. After a while you can’t tell what will happen from the differences, even if the results were reliable before. Unless you crack its random attractor.”

Hoffstetler’s sigh might have been gratified. “Mmmh. Go on.”

Tim held a door for Hoffstetler as they moved into a new area of the walkway. “Hey, check this out – first time I saw it I thought it was a cyclops. It's a mastodon. Came out of the riverbed ten miles away. Sorry. ‘S just my fave. Back to the stuff. Random attractors...they’re a set point that quantum systems are drawn to, despite the chaos built in. Fractals, they’re systems trying to get back to the attractor, spinning around it. ”

“Creating beauty,” Hoffstetler mused.

“But while that’s happening, the quantum shit spins off other versions of what could happen. Parallel universes. Figuring the random attractor narrows your range of results again. Which brings us back to these guys. Their deal is trying to open up on a universe that isn’t ours but is aligned enough with our random attractor, whatever that is, that we can still understand it. Exist in it. Without going crazy right away.”

Tim added, “A whole lot of random, here. The place we’re going is next to my freshman dorm. Would that affect what they’re doing?”

“Everything affects everything. Whether we wish it to or not.”

Tim was walking backwards in front of Hoffstetler now, keeping them face to face. He opened his hands. “How’d I do on the quiz, Doc? Do I pass?”

There was Hoffstetler’s smile, tilted by the scarring. A few gold teeth gleamed. “I would mark you down for the colloquialisms. But, yes, you would pass. I have had more imperfect students.” The smile shut down instantly, his eyes darkening. “Your father could also condense a concept. For his own means. Did he teach you the way of it?”

They stood face to face. The ampthetamine-exam flow was at its peak. Tim said, “I was eight when he died. I hardly remember him telling me how to wash my hands before using the can.”

Hoffstetler swayed, leaned on his cane. “Eight? I thought you were older.”

"Yeah, well, I gotta stop smoking."

Hoffstetler went on. “I had no idea your father had a son. None. And I worked with him.”

The dude had brought it up himself. “You’ve said that a couple times, and dropped it.” Left him hanging, more like. Tim cut himself fully loose. “Maybe on the ride back you can tell me some about him. Not the confidential side. Just...” He flooded with too much to say, choked on it. "Just the man."

They had been passing through the Anthropology area, case upon case of human artifacts, woven and carved: weapons, fetishes, masks. Tim felt their eyes watching him, as dark and forlorn as Hoffstetler’s had become.

"The man. It is threadbare, to say that those who battle with monsters become monsters themselves. Yet what else have I done here? Your father was my enemy."

"Kinda figured."

"I have had other enemies, then and now. I should have remembered that none of them were ever students. Of myself or others." Hoffstetler said this while contemplating a frog-headed idol inside a case. "To teach someone, to shape them, creates a bond. Whatever the teacher's motivation." He sighed deeply.

Tim was lost. "So? On the way back?"

Hoffstetler gave the frog-headed idol a nod. He mused, “If there is a way back. There comes a time when we must ally with our monsters...”

That had to be a yes. They emerged into the moonlit cold again. Tim scanned around them, feeling vivid, alive. The way was clear.  

The Bunkers were the same as always, squat two-story buildings, low and rounded, like concrete sowbugs. Inside the Trof, the grad student took them to a basement room. Tim and Hoffstetler both paused in the doorway. The room, not that big, didn’t hold much beyond some computer mainframes wheezing in beige boxes, and two metal poles with assemblages of electronics and crystals at the base and top. Tim remembered the crystals from the mineral case: boxy, dark purple fluorite.  

One of the many downsides of uppers was that you could get derailed. Tim was sucked into the calculations chalked on the floor. Circles inside circles, sprinkled here and there with chemicals (was that salt? ordinary salt?) when the grad student closed the door. Tim turned at the _whump-clunk_ behind them. Sparkling alertness dove into paranoia, knowing he'd missed something. For the door was a triple-thick metal vault seal.

They all had to stand at a certain location and put on heavy goggles. Salt gritted beneath their feet. Tim put his on last and frowned as heavy purple lenses dulled his vision. The grad student got a video camera going and muttered, “I’m gonna hold this blackboard. It’s got, uh, calculations to show anything we see that we’re intelligent.”

Tim said, “Wait, there’s gonna be alive stuff on the other side?”

“If we’re lucky!” said the professor. He giggled.

"What the fuck do you do if it's dangerous? Are you armed?"

The grad student said, with the patience used for the extremely dumb, "The simplest solution is to throw the kill switch. Shut the portal down."

Hoffstetler cursed softly in Russian. He looked up at Tim. The goggles suited him. "Stand behind me," Tim muttered. Hoffstetler made a slight retreat.

They stood and sweated while the professor, at the narrow side table, turned things on.

Three computer screens sprang to black-and-green life, calculations flashing faster than even Tim could read. A looping whine rose. Light kindled inside the crystals. From the base and top of each metal pole, four wires on powerful magnets flicked towards each other, creating a rectangle of fine metal. “Turn to face the door, please. Close your eyes for the count of thirty. Three...two...one.” There was an instant of crackling, ghastly static, speeding up until it went _VORP._ The silence that followed seemed to belong to a bigger room than the one where they stood. _  
_

“Oh. Oh, this is...yes. Please turn around, but move no further.”

Tim spun, a hand inside his jacket, on his pistol. Now, the rectangle opened beyond the wall. Not onto dimmed concrete, but into purpureal darkness. The darkness varied: there was a sense of space, of objects. Heavy, cold air poured along the floor to coil around their ankles. Tim felt it climb his spine, turning his sweat to cold slime.

What happened next sent him onto screaming high alert. “Some shit’s moving in there.”

Hoffstetler leaned forwards. He inhaled in wonder. “I see them. Like pyramids.” Tim couldn’t unsee their silhouettes after that, black against the darkness. At the top of one, there was an awful flicker of light, purple through the goggles. An eye, maybe. The grad student, well behind Tim, lifted the blackboard. Hoffstetler, beside Tim, moved his hands widely. Like he was waving, or making some sign, pointing and then clashing both fists together.

In response, the side of one pyramid peeled free, splitting into..a fan? Hideous spidery limbs? There was a flow to them, coiling cold like the air along the floor. Tentacles.

Hoffstetler said, breathlessly, “It understands. We’re here to communicate –- ”

Tim drew his pistol. Then the tentacles whipped out, three places at once. They wanted the board, they wanted Tim’s gun, and they wanted Hoffstetler. Hoffstetler’s defiant shout was nearly a laugh of madness already.

Tim yanked back against the black whip-tip dragging his arm. Wherever it hit his skin, there was a chemical sting. With his free hand, he flung off the damn goggles so he could see --

He saw, all right --

And he was yelling, firing one-handed while the student read his mind, screaming _kill kill kill kill_ \--

One of the crystals went _spang_ , exploding into shards --

The dark rectangle snapped back to that hideous-sounding static and seeing it was worse, a jittering chaos of black and white, patternless, meaningless, depth beyond depth, nothingness without rest without time hellish hypnotic consuming sickening searing into his retinas --

It blinked out with another _VORP_.

Tim was brandishing his smoking Glock at a blank concrete wall, trying to take in the peculiar flatness of a mere three dimensions, when voices penetrated. Two voices, not three. Where was Hoffstetler?

The student said, “I meant throw the kill switch. You took the goggles off?”

Tim shook his head, squinting. Hoffstetler’s hat was on the floor: textured, angled, a weighty, giddy relic. So was a severed tentacle, black detailed with violet. It was dissolving into ichor, still writhing for the hat, the only piece of Hoffstetler that remained. Tim nudged the hat away, into the clean salt, with his toe. As he moved, everything tilted. Tim closed his eyes. “I had to see.”

“You took the goggles off...he’s gonna go down any second...”

“Who?” Tim asked, blinking. The static was back. No, it wasn’t. Someone detached his pistol from his hand. He turned to protest, to shout, to force them to turn the damn thing back on, go back and get ---

The room lurched, its geometry wrong, everything wrong. And vomiting vertigo poleaxed him.

* * *

Three weeks later, Tim was alone in a pew at the memorial ceremony. Baltimore’s Unitarian church was far larger than the turnout needed. There were maybe twenty people beneath the domed white ceiling, arced and gridded. As he took the ceiling in, its geometry suddenly warped, to Tim’s vision, into something non-Euclidian and --

_it was back it was everywhere the black the white the jittering chaos the hideously full nothingness hungry entropy waiting to grind existence in its teeth of light its maws of void its dizzying --_

Color and life flicked back around him, like a switch had been thrown. Tim swallowed bile. The professionals who had poked and prodded at him said those visions of the interdimensional space were flashbacks, like Vietnam vets had. Tim didn’t think so. He’d had injuries, felt flashbacks. This shit was something else entirely. Rifts into that hellish nothing.

If he thought about it more, it would suck him back in. Tim focused back on the people. All of them, ludicrously, were focused on Hoffstetler’s homburg hat, placed where a coffin would usually go. They'd rebuilt the portal but they hadn't been able to replicate the results, not even when they'd set it up to run twenty-four hours a day on micro-variations of the calculations. Tim hadn't been there for it. Had he been the attractor? Or Hoffstetler?

The final arrivals set the seal of guilt and madness on it for Tim: the man whose daughter his father had shot and his housekeeper. Giles and Zelda. They were both around the same age that Hoffstetler had been. The moment they were seated, someone began to play a violin, piercing and mournful. The memorial ceremony began.

The Unitarian minister stepped up. She said, “We are honored by Dr. Hoffstetler’s request to have his memorial in a place sacred to peace and unity. While we are a spiritual concourse here, believing in a greater force that unifies our world, we honor his wishes further with a secular ceremony today. Consider me your facilitator...”

Tim tightened his lips. There was a greater force, all right. Damn shame it wasn’t on anyone’s side at all.

A grad student was up at the pulpit. “To quote one of Dr. Hoffstetler’s inspirations, Tielhard de Chardin, ‘ _The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others._ _’_ As one of his Ph.D advisees at Johns Hopkins I experienced this through…”

The Miskatonic professor, now an Occam man, like Hoffstetler had been. “We would never have advanced as far as we did without Dr. Hoffstetler’s research and findings. Words cannot express our profound regret at his passing. This is a grave loss to the entire scientific community.” 

The man kept terrified eye contact with Tim the entire time, though Tim wasn’t his minder. Tim gave the researcher a nod. He hadn’t said what really happened. That was at such a high security level, it was surprising they were left alive. Tim, next week, would be put through the grinder of FBI procedural analysis. Provided he survived this memorial.

Tim glanced at the program. He was slated to speak second to last. He revived a bit when the next person to speak was Zelda. At least he’d find out how she and Giles were connected to all this. And he could follow what a housekeeper would say without sounding like an idiot.

Zelda, like the minister, was a short, rounded woman. The pulpit fit her perfectly. Its lighting caught her dark-purple hat just so, turned her loose silver curls into a halo. She cleared her throat loudly and tapped her toe against the wood before she began.

Her voice filled the space. “This doctor was a good man. A quiet man. I remember him from a lab where we both worked in the early Sixties. Unlike some of us then, he wasn’t quiet because he couldn’t speak out. He was quiet because he was busy doing what made him good. What was that? It started from the day we – I – first met him. As a cleaner in that lab. He treated us like we were some account. Like people.”

“That wasn’t usual at the time. He was like that to the experiments, too. Chains and cattle prods - they didn’t call it animal cruelty then. Folks in experiments against their will, like my brothers in the Tuskegee Study, they were expendable. Not really people.” There were several gasps. Tim felt sick.

“But Hoffstetler, he reached out. He helped, when he didn’t have to. He gave when you would’ve thought he didn’t have more to give. And when it all was said and done...he stayed here, in America, and had the career you all are so proud of.” Uncomfortable shuffling.

“I met a lot of scientists in my time but when I think of science, of a real genuine scientist, it is Dimitri that I think of. I hear it’s changed now, that you all are doing science a different way. I hope that’s true. I hear you say he led the way. I know it. He was a man ahead of his time. You say he didn’t want the word of God here today. But I will pray for him in my heart.” Applause, as Zelda strode down from the pulpit, her eyes glittering with unshed tears.

Tim clapped slightly. He was going to sound like a complete, total, absolute idiot. He reached into his pocket and ripped his typed, white-out-blotched half-page in two. By the time he was looming over the pulpit that had fitted Zelda so well, he was left with four sentences.

“There’s not a lot I can say after that. All I’ve got for you is what I saw in, uh, his final days: a very brave man. A committed one. And, uh, what I heard him say. His last words: we’re here to communicate.” He turned to the minister and muttered “That’s it,” which got caught by the pulpit’s microphone, along with some feedback.

The minister began to wrap it up. “As a final reflection let us consider what is often said about our friends, our mentors and family, who have died: _not lost, but gone before_. In our unity as living human beings...” She moved to light a tall candle.

Tim closed his eyes in horror, blocking out the taper’s spark and what it might trigger. Gone before? No. To be taken like that – no.

Finally, it was over. Everyone was milling past Hoffstetler’s hat, going through the motions of a final viewing and a professionally kind moment with the Unitarian. Tim put himself last in the line, keeping an eye on the hat. He’d managed to not throw up on it on the trip back. Were they going to bury it, or would he get to keep it?

After receiving a blessing, Giles looped back, surprisingly quickly, and scooped it up. The one guy Tim couldn’t really call on it. The move did leave Tim face to face with Giles.

Tim managed, “I’m...sorry.  How’d you know him? Occam?”

Giles produced a half-smile. He was harrowed with grief, but up close, his skin still had a wholesome undertone. “In a way. What brings you here?”

“Work. I was...providing security.”

Giles gave this a nod. “He didn’t want to die in America,” he hinted.

Tim bowed his head. “I can’t say what happened. But he definitely didn’t die in America.”

“That’s actually some consolation.”

There was an exasperated breath at about the level of Tim’s heart. He turned to see Zelda standing there, glaring up at him. “Really, now. Did you kill him?”

Tim dropped his voice. “If not saving someone is the same as killing them...yeah.”

Giles clutched the hat to his chest. “Oh, no. No, it’s not.”

“It shouldn’t have come to that. I should have known.”

Zelda, again. “We always know too late.” She eyed him up and down. “Security? Huh. You couldn’t look more like a G-man if you tried, you ask me.”

“Zelda. He said he can’t say. No more than we can.”

Tim nodded. The two men looked at each other. They were miserable and equal, this time around, each wanting the secrets that the other one knew.

Giles said, “Some of us were going for coffee. You could come if you wanted?”

Tim weighed this. If he went they’d ask again, wanting more about how Hoffstetler had died. It was human nature. And he’d spill. With this being his fault, and the fading nausea and enduring anisocoria, and the _rifts_ , he was hanging onto his life by his fingernails. His job, the possibility of not being fired, the handful of people who turned out to give a fuck about him. Spilling would wreck that. 

Time to not make the same mistake twice, despite being sick about the double loss. Of a good man, and of some truths about his father. “I should get on. I’m connecting with, uh, my sister.”

Giles smiled, soft and sad. “It’s good to be able to go home. You’re very lucky.”

“You give her our regards,” said Zelda, relenting into warmth. Tim nodded, craven. He wasn’t up to explaining his stepsister right now. At this point, he felt that if he could make it across Baltimore to Sarah’s rowhome without a non-Euclidian incident, he’d stay alive.

The minister tackled Tim. “Excuse me. Some of the students were asking if there’s going to be a memorial plaque anywhere. His colleagues said you might have some information...”

Dealing with her meant Tim missed eavesdropping on something vital behind him, where Zelda was whispering and Giles was replying. All he caught from Giles was, “No, I’m sure of it. He wouldn’t be so sorry otherwise. He’ll never know if he doesn’t know now.”

A blast of cold air hit Tim with that. By the time he managed to shed the minister and look for them, they were gone. They had slid out a side door, into a gray day that managed, somehow, to be as bright and hard and entrapping as the lab’s concrete.

At the vivid contrast, the void killed the world around him again.

_Next Chapter: 1995 - The Time Capsule._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember memorizing phone numbers. God, I'm old.
> 
> Intelligence and minders at conferences?[ It does happen.](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/10/the-science-of-spying-how-the-cia-secretly-recruits-academics)
> 
> The _homo piscis_ drawing is my tribute to [this piece of promotional art for the movie ](https://thebyrchentwigges.tumblr.com/post/171947803330/very-limited-run-official-promotional-art-for-the)\- very mysterious in light of Guillermo's statements that the creature is unique. 
> 
> More mediocre quantum theory! In the _Shape of Water_ novel Hoffstetler mentions an interest in "random and non-volitional deterministic happenings." A sophisticated double reference to both quantum theory and the pure idea of doing what Hoffstetler himself wants to for a change.
> 
> For a jump to the left, if you want to read Dimitri's very different POV on these events, see a related short, [Looking for a Sign](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405238/chapters/33450693).
> 
> Tip of the hat to [Chaosium and their map of Miskatonic University, including their split into the upper and lower campus!](http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Miskatonic_University)


	5. 1995

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1995: Clearing out the house after Elaine dies, a time capsule – the contents of Richard Strickland’s desk from Occam – turns out to be a time bomb, with a reason to call Giles Dupont again. Bonus: Whatever happened to Occam Aerospace Laboratories?

“Old photos kill me,” Tam said. “Look at this. Thirty years ago, but you can see how into each other these two were. Except it’s Mom and Ross. Parents! Ew!”

Mom was dead and they were sorting through the house.

Elaine had died eerily: six months to the day after her second husband had passed away in his sleep. Like she’d tried living without him, and decided it wasn’t for her. She’d been sixty-eight.

Tim had, as usual, no tears to shed. But he hadn’t felt this stunned since the aftermath of his final Special Agent assignment. He’d totaled his car on the way to the funeral, had to take the train up for this long weekend.

They were in the dining room, the table covered with valuables and paperwork. Tam was determined they’d fight their way through the important stuff today – her idea of important. “Did you go through the ties upstairs?”

Tim grumbled, “I can’t wear those. They’re too colorful.”

Tam put her hands on her hips. “God, Tim, where do you come up with these things? You sound like a black-and-white sitcom....Sarah brought all Mom’s jewelry down. You want some? Engagement rings for the next time around?”

“That’s not funny.” Tim’s divorce had gone through, the last shitty touch to this year. It had all taken a bite out of each side of his hairline.

“I’m as funny as you are, as in, not at all.” Tam held a box out to him. “Take one or two, okay? I’ve got so much of their stuff.”

Tim picked up a swoop of platinum starred with a diamond. A chip in the diamond’s edge caught the light –

_a seed sowing chaos blackness whiteness static torturous sound nauseating sight reeling baseless nothingness underlying undermining in wait to undo the universe -_

At least he hadn't been driving: that was how he'd totaled the car. This was the third rift today. So much for Klonopin. It was the fourth psychiatric drug that hadn't helped. Very little did: darkness, quiet, sex. The last one was how he'd wound up married.

“You okay?”

Tim nearly jumped out of his skin. Sarah had appeared at his elbow, brown eyes tight with concern. He’d been seriously out of it to not see her in that red washed-silk shirt. She’d been pulling boxes out from somewhere. There was a smudge on her round nose, some cobwebs against her dark flipped bob.

“Just... remembering.”

Tam called, “Sarah! You’ve got to take some of this! Mom would’ve wanted you to have keepsakes.”

Tim caught Sarah’s slight sigh. She said, patiently, “I’ll be fine. I’ve got all my mom’s jewelry. Besides, I’m the executor. I’ll be surrounded by all this for weeks after you go back to California.”

“Oh, I’ll be hard to get hold of. I’m flying out to Tibet at the end of next week. The sun never sets on archaeology ethics consulting. Speaking of trips, see this!” Tam brandished a different jewelry box. “This is the jewelry Mom’s first husband brought her after his military gigs. He totally cheated on her when he was on those trips.”

“No!” Sarah gasped.

“One time she found lipstick on a shirt she unpacked.”

Tim knew to stay out of this one. He wanted to be proud that his old man could get it. But: Mom, damn it.

Tam flung back her sharp blonde hair, shoulders squared, a furious Amazon. “He’d come back, give her something, like that made it fine. And Mom put up with it! She said that’s how it was then!”

“Why would he cheat? Elaine was so beautiful, like a Barbie.” Sarah curled her arms around her curves, as if that could crush her roundness smaller. She picked a piece out of the jewelry box, neatly changing the subject. “This is amber. Look inside it! From Russia with bugs!”

Tam joined Sarah. “The pearls with the bizarre enamel clasps are from Japan...those earrings, more from Russia...and that’s from his last gig in Brazil. You could see this from space.” Tam lifted a ring set with a huge yellow stone. It wasn’t well cut. The center of the oval stone was darker than the rest, like a pupil in a golden eye. “Mom never wore it.”

Sarah blinked back at the ring. “But – it’s so pretty.”

Tam chucked the ring at Tim. “Forensics time! Did Mom wear this or not?”

Tim swore, but caught it. The catch was lucky. He’d left the cross-dimensional disaster at Miskatonic with chronic anisocoria, a pupil dilated for life. That was the public-paperwork reason he was out as a field agent. The fuckup of losing Hoffstetler was tangled with his dive into a deeper level of secrets. He’d been told he was lucky they didn’t dispose of people anymore, offered two losing choices: payout-and-witness-protection or an admin-type demotion. Tim wanted to keep his name and his life. Unexpectedly, the shift had worked out. He’d done some retraining – after getting grilled by Hoffstetler, it felt easy. And he’d gone on to kill it in evidence response forensics.

He took a magnifier off his keychain. “Nope. She didn’t. No wear and tear. Compare it to this.” Tim held up the diamond ring. “Little dings in the metal. Rubbed spot here. A chip in the stone.” He threw the yellow ring vaguely in Tam’s direction. She caught it effortlessly.

After _rifts_ , crime scenes were all right. Compared to them, blood spatters, metal shards, maggot-laden corpses were understandable. Their twisted, consumed layers made sense, eventually. He was grimly pleased that, even for scenes with high-clearance paranoia or paranormal overlap, the word was he 'could handle it'.

Tam chucked the yellow ring back in its box from five feet away. Her aim was, as always, perfect. “I’m going to see if there’s any real coffee in this house. All I saw on the counter was Folger’s instant.” She loped next door, into the kitchen.

Watching Tam’s athletic retreat, Sarah slipped back over to Tim. “I can’t believe she’s forty-three. Flying out to Tibet? Is she a superhero? I figure she’d tell you.”

“I don’t think so.” A gap between two of Sarah’s shirt buttons showed a diamond of skin, magnetic to his eyes. “Mom didn’t look her age either.”

Sarah smiled a touch, dimpling her cheeks. “She was dyeing her hair ‘til the end. I dye my hair! It’s not that Tam looks young, more that... compared to my relatives, the three of you were always larger than life. Like you belonged in a movie, or a novel. Perfect stepmother, dazzling stepsister, cool FBI agent.”

Tim scoffed. “I’m a total has-been. Forensics are, like, glorified janitors. You, uh, want any of this?” Tim nudged the jewelry box they’d been discussing. Sarah shook her head.

“How about the ones your dad gave our mom?” Tim offered the diamond he still held to her.

Sarah’s lips parted. “I shouldn’t. Not a ring. If I show up with a big diamond - it’s been years and my boyfriend hasn’t - well. He says it’d be awkward when we work in the same specialty.”

Tim's left hand curled into a fist. He forced the other man out of his mind, kept his voice even. "You can't win with these things. My ex was a great idea. Both FBI, we could get where the other person was coming from, neither of us wanted kids. Didn't last five years."

"Thanks. I think." Sarah looked down. “Tam's going to ask me about the jewelry until I take something. Don’t tell her what I said? She’ll say I sound like a _Cathy_ cartoon again.” She gave that the same witty lightness she had when tiptoeing around the old house, wrangling aquarium visitors, doing everything.

“’Course not. Still owe you for letting me die on your couch that time. Debt of honor.” After Hoffstetler’s Baltimore funeral, he’d spent three days on Sarah’s living-room couch, unbalanced, backslid to vomiting vertigo. In between him being sick, they’d talked – almost, but not quite, too much. Enough for one of them to say _don_ _’_ _t tell Tam_ for the first time.

“That was eleven years ago.” Her eyes narrowed with mischief. _Monty Python_ -style, she said, “Which would you prefer: a wafer-thin mint? Or a bucket?”

Tim smiled for real. “Aw, try it. You totally earned it that time.”

Sarah took the jewel. “I always did like it. It’s gorgeous...but, see. Too big.” She passed it back to Tim. He palmed it, suddenly deciding he’d keep it.

Tim held his left hand up. “Our side, we’ve all got huge monster hands.” Sarah spread her right hand, holding it near Tim’s to see how hers shrank in comparison.

They paused, hovering, not touching. Like there was a hot sheet of glass between them.

When Tam yelled from the kitchen, they jolted apart. “Tim! Wait ‘till you see this!” She shouldered into the dining room, holding out a battered cardboard box, half-covered in stamps, printed on one side: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.

She had already ripped it open. “I think this was what was left in Dad’s desk at Occam after he died. It’s like a time capsule.” Tam pulled out another box, small and green in her hand.

Tim said, “Holy fuck. The candy.”

They both turned to Sarah, talking over each other. “This candy was Dad’s thing – if he let you have a candy it was the biggest deal – you did NOT touch Dad’s candy.”

“Is it still good?” Sarah asked.

Tim peered into the box. Green hard candy had melted and recrystallized into something that looked infected. Corrupted sweetness. “No.”

Tam said, “I nicked one once. He yelled at me like I was in the Army. I’d never been so scared in my life.”

Sarah gasped. “That’s terrible!”

Tim said, “C’mon. That’s just a talking to. Dad never laid a hand on us.”

Tam began, “Not on _us_. He – never mind. Let’s see what else is in here.” She and Tim shoved the jewelry boxes out of the way to unload the real treasure.

There was a sheet of paperwork. A knifelike letter opener. Some Eagle Black pencils. A copy of _The Power of Positive Thinking._ A cigarette lighter, an ashtray, a tarnished liquor flask, three bottles of long-expired codeine. A box of nine-millimeter bullets. The world’s coolest vintage stapler, its upper half a swoop of mint-green Bakelite.

“THE ARMY STAPLER!”

Tim held it just long enough to flip it and read its base, marked with another man’s name, COLONEL C.W. HOYT. Then, Tam snatched it away.

“Why is a stapler such a big deal?” Sarah laughed.

“Dad got it from the man who taught him everything he knew,” Tam gasped. She was working to keep the stapler away from Tim, backing into the kitchen with it. Tim threw her off by leaping behind her, grabbing for the stapler from that angle. Tam stepped on his foot and lightly elbowed his gut at the same time.

That was when Sarah spoke up. “There’s something else in the box. Who’s this woman?”

Sarah had opened a yellow interoffice mail envelope, to fan out about ten black-and-white photos. She held one up. It happened to be a profile shot. The siblings stopped fighting. Tam went back to the table, put the stapler down. “She’s— she’s that woman who – what was her name – Lisa Epolito?”

Tim went to her side. “Elisa Esposito. Dad shot her.”

Sarah dropped the photo, covering her hand with her mouth.

Tim swept up half the photos. Tam took the other half. One by one, they laid them out, alternating. “Security camera pics,” Tim said. “Check out the date and timestamp. Late ’62...his last case.”

He started putting them in date order. They spanned about a week, September 20th through 26th. Tim was hard pressed to see their purpose as evidence. Most of them were close-ups or shots of the woman alone, doing mundane things. Mopping, bending over a trash can, clocking in or out in her regular clothes. Tim caught two different butterfly brooches. They brought to mind Hoffstetler’s long ranting on quantum theory, the butterfly effect, random attractors.

Sarah was looking over Tim’s shoulder. “She’s so skinny.”

“Yeah, really. Get her a sandwich,” Tim muttered.

Tam squinted. “What’s wrong with her neck?”

They all leaned in. The picture Tim held was the clearest of the bunch, a close-up of the woman’s face and throat, framed by a coat collar. Tim reached down and traced what that photo captured, scar lines around about a quarter of her throat on one side.

Tim said, “Parallel marks on the other side. It’s like her throat got slit sometime. On purpose.”  

Tam grimaced. “But why?”

“Save her from choking?” Sarah suggested.

“Someone tried to kill her, and didn’t succeed.” Tim eyed the photo with new respect.

Sarah said, “They still had mumps back then. Maybe she had infected glands removed?”

“Right! She was an orphan. So surgery, bad surgery in a hurry, and throat damage. Remember, she couldn’t talk. It was in the article.”

Tam said, “I can’t believe the two of you! Stop being gross. It’s like you’re dissecting her!” She pulled back, pale. Sarah tapped Tim’s arm, met his eyes – she had this – and zoomed over to smother Tam with attention and apologies.

Tim kept probing. Did Elisa have a file in the envelope? No. Nothing but a small, maroon felt bag. Tim opened it. It contained a plain gold ring.

This ring was tiny. It had never been his mother’s, not even on her pinky finger. Its metal was slick, smooth, nickless. Never worn, especially by a night-shift janitor. In silent support of this, the base of the bag still had the ring’s price tag. Tim slipped the ring back in the envelope and checked something else. The box had old tape. Mom had received it and stowed it, unopened.

Tim returned to the photograph they’d examined. It had more wear and tear than the ring. There was a cracking indentation at its bottom margin that gave him a sinking feeling. Tim tried his right thumb, then his left, in the mark. His left thumb fit perfectly. It was exactly like the dents he’d left in magazines and comic books as a teenager: holding them in his left hand while jacking off with his right.

So: his father had kept a folder of well-thumbed security-cam pics of a skinny handicapped woman, paired with a bright new ring. Then he’d gone on to shoot her. This wasn’t fucked up _at all_ , not in the least.

He wasn’t going to open his mouth about this. _God, Tim, where do you come up with these things._ He was getting an idea. Repulsed, recognizing, Tim let the photograph fall to cover the jewelry his mother had never worn.

It took all his willpower to not glance at Sarah's red silk and dark hair. She was asking Tam, “What do you want to do with her pictures?”

Tam said, “That Giles guy! Could you get these pictures to him?”

Tim backed away from the table. “Why me?”

Tam blushed. “I can’t do it. I was such an ass that time. I dragged you all the way up to his place and just babbled at him. Mail them or something? You’re at the FBI, you can find anybody.”

“If they’re alive. He’ll be in his 80s.”

“I’ll let you have the stapler.”

After all, that Tim still coveted its Bakelite weight. He pictured his dad working with the man whose name was on the stapler, sharing a drink and a smoke. A clean moment. He tucked the rest of Elisa’s photos into their envelope as Tam continued. “You know we’re orphans now, right? Like Elisa was.”

Tim gestured at the table covered with paperwork, jewelry, more. “It’s a little different.”

“It’s about the people, Tim. Get over here.” Tim went rigid as Tam took his hand. Tam kept an arm around Sarah’s shoulder.

Tam did that little inhale she did before some idealistic speech. “Mom’s family’s faded out. We never knew Dad’s family much. Your side’s been great to us, Sarah, but you’re the one who’s been through the wringer with us. Promise me we’ll always be there for each other – we’ll always be family.”

Tim and Sarah exchanged a hollow look. Tam clenched Sarah’s shoulder harder.

“You’re making me cry,” Sarah said. “I promise.”

“Yeah. I promise.” Tim held up the envelope, still in his left hand, light and treacherous. “First things first: I deliver.”

* * *

Between the National Library and one phone call, Tim managed to track Giles Dupont down. Giles said, surprisingly, he wanted to meet up in Baltimore. “October 14th suit? I’d like to see the park they made out of Occam.” Tim agreed instantly. If he mailed the photos, it would be harder to ask questions.

Occam Aerospace Laboratories had evaporated in a white-light explosion in 1985, taking out two city blocks around it. (Tim remembered the Miskatonic professor and student who’d been shunted to Occam the year before, and he wondered.) _Occam Confidential_ came out two years later, a tell-all book crammed with stories of weirdness from the research center.

Its author, Sally McGillicuddy, had been the high-clearance secretary for Occam's visiting top brass. Her combination of spice and salt made the book a best-seller. _Queer as I was, I_ _’_ _d rather be chased around the desk by a man who was hands-and-glands than have the Bible quoted at me all night, as happened sometimes. I could put a man who knew he was sinning in his place in half a minute, and make him like it! But someone who thought he was better than the rest of us was the worst kind..._

Tim had read it, of course. He’d been rewarded by a telling photo of his father and a much younger Hoffstetler talking to some general. McGillicuddy had captioned it without their names, simply saying, _Researchers often disagreed with military authorities, leading to constant tension._ From the image, that looked about right.

Baltimore parking was heinous, Tim told himself, so he took the train up. Giles had said to meet ‘by the statue.’ They’d kept about four blocks undeveloped for the park, green space except for a brick-paved plaza at the heart of the old Occam building.

It was surprisingly full for a rainy day. Tim lit a cigarette with his father's old lighter (only a loosie, he told himself) while watching a crowd and TV cameras around a platform with celebrities. Baltimore’s Mayor Turnbladt (still looking good), several super-hero types. He caught someone polished talking to a camera. “...for the tenth anniversary of the Occam disaster. Tune in for a special _60 Minutes_ this Sunday about Occam. Featuring a Point/Counterpoint on how super-powers and the science around them influence, or damage, our society, plus an interview with saucy Sally McGillicuddy...” They were missing out, Tim thought, by not having Zelda on, too.

At the paved plaza, after Tim rounded the other side of a wall, he figured he was in the right place. There was a wide area of bronze, a shallow sculpture: abstract figures of a man, a woman, a taller figure handing them a torch, backed by an eagle. At the base were the words TO THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR KNOWLEDGE. To the left was a plaque with the names of everyone who’d died in the disaster. To the right, another plaque explained the origin of the name _Occam_. For this memorial day, somebody had set a wreath, nothing but green leaves, below the larger words.

A smooth voice behind Tim said, “Prometheus.”

Tim turned. He remembered Giles, or thought he did: a tall old guy, glasses, beard, cardigan. This man fit the silhouette in his mind but looked younger than Tim expected, timeless in a pale trench coat, a few carnations in florist’s paper in his hand. Giles’ hair was still tawny: dyed, maybe. Anyway, old people didn't look as old as they used to, now that he was forty-one himself.

Giles gestured at the statues. “That’s what the bas-relief there is supposed to be. Prometheus, giving fire to humanity. The light of knowledge.”

“Greek myths, right. So they threw in an eagle to make it patriotic.”

“Oh, no. The eagle is the punishment of the gods for what Prometheus is doing right there. The gods didn’t like him giving their power away. So they chained him to a rock forever, and sent the eagle to eat his liver, every day. But Prometheus, being the son of the gods, was immortal. It didn’t kill him. He’d heal overnight, then the next day, the eagle would return.”

Giles surveyed it. “I suppose it’s all right. It's already rather dated. I was invited to submit a design to the committee. Mine was based on the four classic elements. Earth, air, fire...water. Not scientific enough, they said. Story of my life!”

In front of Prometheus, Giles raised the flowers. “I was going to just leave these here. In memory of, as it were. But I can do a little better, I think.” He took the red carnations out of their paper, snap-twisted their stems short, and tucked them into the wreath. There were three of them. They looked like they’d always been there, a red heart of petals against the green. Conscientiously, Giles binned the paper.

"Those for Hoffstetler? I think of him a lot." Every day: every time that _rift_ into entropy opened. “How are you doing?”

“I seem to be holding up all right. Modern medicine and all that.” Giles looked from the wreath to the envelope in Tim’s hand.

Tim said, “I’ve got the pictures here.”

Eagerness flashed in Giles’ face. “I’ll take them.” Giles went to the nearest bench to see them immediately. He did not protest when Tim joined him.

Giles had an artist’s way of holding the photo paper. Somehow the lower edge smoothed out in his hand. “Oh, God. It is Elisa. Look at her tired little face. There’s a French word for women like her: _minois chiffone_. It means ‘crumpled’, but charmingly so. She pulls it off. Don’t you think?”

Giles was talking about Elisa like she was still alive. Ouch.

Tim cleared his throat. “Her jewelry’s in the bottom. A ring.”

Giles gave him a sharp look. “Elisa never wore rings. She could never find ones small enough.”

“Uh – it’s there.”

Giles found it, tipped the ring out into his hand and looked at it. Finally, he slid the ring back into the felt bag. Handing that back to Tim, he said, “Why are you here?”

“We thought you’d want the pictures? Somebody should...my sister bribed me with a stapler...”

“A stapler?”

“It’s one of our things. She, uh, sends her regards. Traveling. She’s sorry for being awkward last time. When we – when she came to your house to apologise.”

“She seemed to need to talk to someone.” Giles lifted one of the pictures. “Elisa taught me that you should be kind, when you have the chance. And that we have more chances than we think.”

Tim gestured at the picture, the scars above the butterfly brooch. "Was she...okay...with the throat thing? Do you know how it happened?"

"No. She was found like that as a baby. I simply assumed that - well, people are awful, sometimes. Especially to the vulnerable."

Tim thought of the things he saw regularly at work. "I get that." This conversation was going downhill, but he could use that trajectory. “Was she having an affair with my dad?”

Tim hadn’t seen such an eloquent eyebrow-raise since Hoffstetler had died. He said, “I guess she wouldn’t tell you, you being her dad.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s that you’re not the first to wonder. I’m told Strickland had a certain... intensity around her. But no. She was in love with someone else at the time.”

“The Mexican.”

Giles paused. “He was Brazilian, actually.”

“The guy. The – " The one who'd killed his father, which had a whole other layer of meaning, now.

“Yes.”

“Then why’d they say he was Mexican?”

Giles shrugged. “More threatening, I suppose. Those brown men who belong tidying up your yard betraying America instead of the dashing Latin lover.”

Tim circled back. “You’re sure the ring wasn’t hers.”

“Definitely. Elisa showed me every pretty thing she got. I mean, you tell me: when a man’s hanging onto a ring with pictures of a woman, what’s he thinking?” Tim thought of what he’d gone through around women and rings.

Whatever showed in his face, Giles replied to it. “I don’t like it either. But we very much appreciate the pictures.”

“If I told you about her...what would I say?” There was a long pause. “When I’ve thought of her, of Elisa, lately, all that comes to mind is a poem. Made of just a few truthful words...whispered by someone in love.”

_Unable to perceive the shape of you_

_I find you all around me._

_Your presence fills my eyes with your love,_

_it humbles my heart,_

_for you are everywhere._

“Huh.” It was a New Age riddle to Tim.

“But not – not a picture. Not her face. Now we have that back. All these different angles. Thank you. Thank you so much.” Giles folded the envelope to his heart, more gently than Tim had ever handled it.

Silently, Tim offered him the ring.

“That’s not for me. I know what to do with it, though.” Giles stood. “How about I take you for a drive?”

Giles showed his age at last behind the wheel of a Ford sedan. He was a fucking awful driver. Terrifying. Someone should stop him, Tim thought. By the time they pulled into a spot that didn’t seem to be a legal parking space, there hadn’t been any _rifts_ , but Tim’s life and his own recent car accident had definitely flashed before his eyes.

Giles ambled away from the car, untroubled by any concerns about paying a meter. Tim stuffed a few coins in the closest one. By the time he caught up with Giles, the man was at the end of a  shortish canal. “This is where your father died.”

New brick townhouses with water views lined half the canal. From a shop further down, there was a vanilla smell from fresh-baked cookies, encouraging people to linger along this mini-waterfront. Here, where his father had killed and died. Joining the dark, unspoken underlay of American history.

Giles himself was struck. “They've fixed it up here. It couldn’t be more different. The place where it truly happened, the dark and the rain, it’s only in my tired old memory, now.”

Tim looked around the waterfront. “Where’d my old man hit you?”

Giles took a few steps onto some fresh wooden decking. “I’d say...about here. I must confess, I did hit your father back.”

Tim’s mouth quirked. Good thing Giles had waited twenty years to tell him. “Did you knock him out?”

Giles stared into the invisible past, its dark and rain. “I’m not certain. I’m fairly sure I broke his nose. Not bare-handed. I used a two-by-four. That was what it took! Even that didn’t stop him long. He still got up fighting. He was about your age now.”

“No he wasn’t. He was thirty-five. I’m forty-one.” Tim remembered how old his father looked in the _Occam Confidential_ picture, in his ID. Recalled him gray with exhaustion in the doorway, smoking and wounded, keeping something from his own void to himself. Giles at least had Zelda – whoever she really was – to share what he’d endured.

Giles shrugged lightly. “I get terrible with ages as time goes on. Everyone who didn’t live through the Depression looks young to me.”

There were a few gulls, mewling sadly overhead. Wind rustled some awnings. It was just the two of them at the end of the canal. Tim asked, “Has it been long enough that you can say more?”

Giles bowed his head. “No more than you can about our friend Hoffstetler. It’s nothing personal. Perhaps your reason is the same as mine. Are you still doing, ah, security? With the government?"

Tim was silent.

"I like my life at the moment. It’s like this neighborhood. A lot better than it used to be. And being here brings back another poem. For your father: for Strickland. The ending of a poem, as is fitting.” Giles began:

_Meanwhile, we do no wrong, for they_

_That with a god have striven_

_Not hearing much of what we say_

_Take what the god has given_

_Though like waves breaking it may be_

_Or like a changed, familiar tree_

_Or like a stairway to the sea_

_Where down the blind are driven._

“Edward Robert Arlington. _Eros Turranos._ One of my favorites when I was your age.”

As with the other poem, Tim had no idea what Giles meant. But there was something dark and powerful to it. It felt right.

Maybe Giles had offered it as an exchange. Because, next, Giles said, “That ring. Do us both a favor. Toss it into the water...”

The crazy waste had instant appeal. Tim was exhausted after ten years of strangeness. Worn to a thread trying to have a normal life. Bracing for another round of drug withdrawal before trying something new. Always hollow because of the secrets, the lies, the something-missing. He was not here to communicate. Getting rid of something around that, anything, would be a relief.

Tim threw the ring. It wasn’t satisfying, putting all that hard force behind something as light as one of Elisa’s pictures. The ring spun through the air, lazy, uncontrolled, but it was impossible to miss the water. Tim saw one last flash, and it was gone.

Giles gave a nod of approval. “They used to do that in Venice. A ritual that meant the prince of the city was married to the sea.”

Tim looked at the dirty water, the churning glittering unknown and all it concealed, with a sinking feeling. Nothing was thrown away – he was wedded to it. His mind flashed to Sarah, working at the National Aquarium. He could just catch the Aquarium's glass gleam, four piers over. This wasn’t the quantum coincidence of the decade, wasn’t fucked up _at all_ , not in the least.

It also wasn’t one of the rifts. So he got over it and began another extended, ambivalent goodbye to Giles.

 

_Next Chapter: The Artwork._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The way these characters have worked out, if either of Strickland’s children was going to be recruited by nefarious powers to go and search for a certain Asset, it would definitely be Tam.
> 
>  _only a loosie_ \- Note for international readers - in the US, especially the East Coast, this is a single cigarette, purchased on the sly from a corner store/street vendor. 
> 
> Tim is consistently wrong about Giles' age - he thinks, at all points so far in this story, that Giles is 10 years younger than Giles really is. According to the art book, Giles is 60 at the time of the film, which makes him 92 here. 
> 
> The novel takes Strickland's interest in Elisa to another obsessive level - fascinated by her scars, thinking about running away with her. 0_o
> 
> Remember the secretary in the film background, Sally, who had a word with Strickland now and then? And such an appalled expression, whenever she was in his presence. That woman had to have stories.


	6. 2006

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fluke brings Tim Strickland the classified files for the case that killed his father. And Giles receives a demented phone call from a man who still doesn't know enough.

It started up at the end of a gray, routine autumn week.

On one side of a blessedly low-lit FBI lab, Tim had been loitering at his desk, feeling that there should be, for once, a reason for his funk. He wasn’t doing as much field work as he used to. Fifty-two and all that. With his head down over admin, he’d forgotten that daylight savings had wheeled to the dark side. He was waiting for deeper dark for his commute back to Alexandria, less traffic, fewer maybe-triggering flashes from car headlights.

Tim leafed through a men’s magazine, paused at an article about ‘paleo’: a high-protein diet to hone you back to animal fitness. Intriguing. He’d decided he was done with drugs, medicine, the whole establishment that concealed and denied entire areas of the world. Tam had been furious with him: _you_ _’_ _re not supposed to take psych meds like a lab rat, stopping and starting all the time, you were saner on them_. Whether he was mad at her or protective of her, there was no way to tell Tam his real deal. Without MomandRoss keeping them connected, they barely spoke.

He wasn’t sure if Tam had asked their stepsister to keep tabs on him or if she was, typical Sarah, being nice. Sarah had shed the guy who’d strung her along and was having an adorable renaissance. It was Tim’s occasional pleasure to growl at a recalcitrant garage on her behalf, or ask her for tech support for a laptop or camera. Last time, asking about a digital camera had backfired. She’d asked him to send her - and Tam, of course - a photo of himself.  Tim had held off, loathing every picture. He could control his body: honed it so that time and age had little meaning, lashed it into exhaustion so he could sleep, tamed his inescapable desires with sordid porn. But his face betrayed everything going on in his mind.

Fit as he forced himself to be, there was a rounded-off finality to being fifty-two at the FBI. Nothing was stopping him from retiring. Literally, nothing: the lacuna that the rest of his life had become.

Tim flicked to another page in the magazine. A retro trend was at its peak, men in sleek suits and – that was it. It was the time of year. His father, his mother, Hoffstetler had all died in this first half of October. Tim relaxed an increment.

The phone rang, on a Thursday at twenty-one hundred hours. Calling instead of email? Someone was, for whatever reason, as much of a loser as he was. Tim grabbed it on the second ring. “Strickland. You’re talking to me, you’ve got problems.”

There was a huff of hysterical laughter. They introduced themselves. Their voice was so jittery that he didn’t catch their name, couldn’t tell if they were a man or a woman from their variable tenor. Their code phrases took him back to his field agent days. “I’m calling from _one of the New England offices_. One of the side bureaus called in a few of us _as a favor_ and – it’s _a situation_ and – ”

“Lot of situations lately, huh?” Tim felt a second wave of relief. Over the past few months, the rifts had been as frequent as they had been after what went down in 1984. If there was a _situation_ eddying out there, that also made sense.

There was a tense breath. “Are you related to a Richard Strickland?”

“Yyyyyyeah,” Tim drawled.

The voice firmed. “I’m looking through the files around Richard Strickland’s final case. They have some overlap to the _situation_. Since you were family, in the area at the time it happened, maybe you had, uh, some more _intel_?” There was a ticking, desperate pause. “It was a frog man, right?”

For these case files, it was all online and searchable now if you had clearance. But the non-Google search function of the internal archive was terrible. “Okay, look. You sound on the young side. Back then that meant...”  Wait a minute. Why was Tim saying that when he could say, “... a couple of things. Have to look at the case files to find out what I’ve got that you don’t.”

“Good, great, I’ll put in a request. You’re closer to Archives than we are.” The ease of it gave Tim a chill. “Once you’ve got these, I’ll...I’m requesting the files....now. There. I’ll be back in touch.”

“Uh, when? Tomorrow?”

That troubling, cracked laugh again. “I. Oh, God. I hope so. Thanks. Thanks so much.” They hung up.

Tim looked at his desk phone’s screen. CALLER ID BLOCKED.

He scrambled up, grim tension turned to real energy. He strode to his car. Above the parking lot, the moon was a piercing crescent in the Virginia night, thin and golden. He’d thought he’d have to wait until 2012, the fifty-year mark when files were supposed to be declassified. Tim inhaled the first real autumn crispness, the scent of leaves, remembering his young grief, alive as he remembered it.   

The files came through the next day. Of course they arrived at 4:45 on the Friday before a holiday weekend. The Evidence area was as quiet as it got. Tim hauled three grayish document crates and a poster roll into his group’s office-lab space. He cleared a steel evidence table, spaced the boxes and the poster roll along it. This was it. He was finally going to find out, once and for all, the truth around his father’s death. Inside his chest, his heart was hammering a mile a minute.

Tim undid the poster roll’s seal. He had forgotten about Giles Dupont’s confisticated art until the first large-size copy slid out and he saw the sketch lines. He turned it over, going cold, ready for the face of the man who’d killed his father.

“What the fuck.” Tim held up the art-copy. “What the fuck.” An examination light behind it, shining through the paper, made its details stand out, glowing. “What. The. Everloving. Fuck. _I remember you._ _”_

The being on paper couldn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t have, even if he was there, he was so very far from human. _Homo piscis_ , the debunked, mythic merman.

Three boxes, five hours, and a PowerBar later, Tim was still putting it together. He’d spread out the records over all the lab tables and the sink counter. Though he’d dragged his work phone close, waiting for CALLER ID BLOCKED to ring, they hadn’t. Not that he had anything for them.

The whole case was a period piece. Classic Cold War, the space race, Communist spies, cleaning ladies, all drawn in by his father’s prize. A Devonian, an Amphibian Man, the Asset.

There was an official summary paper. It broke down the events in a timeline. Tim’s father had hauled the creature from the Amazon river to Occam so it could be used to improve how humans breathed in space. Before its could be killed and dissected, it had been kidnapped. Its absence let Strickland uncover a Russian spy, Hoffstetler, at Occam. Strickland had hunted down and shot Hoffstetler (fuck) getting the names of the man’s co-conspirators (Zelda, fuck, along with Elisa). He'd chased down and shot the creature and Elisa. But Strickland had failed to survive finding them, his throat slit by the creature. Nor had he stopped the wounded creature's memorable plunge off the docks, carrying Elisa's limp body. Hoffstetler had survived and offered his full cooperation to the U.S. government, on one condition: pardons for Giles and Zelda.

The Amphibian Man part, according to an appendix, rated about medium for the weirdness of 1962. There had been a cluster of oddness at that time, 1961 to 1963: the last year of Eisenhower, Barney and Betty Hill meeting aliens, the emergence of the first confirmed super-powered humans, the Kennedy assassination. Nothing really connected in a way that made sense, but the world had never gotten...normal again. Tim thought of Hoffstetler and his strange attractors, and checked the appendix’s author. Sure enough, it was by Hoffstetler, at the height of his quantum theory career fifteen years later.

There had been a sighting that might have been the creature near Tulum, in Mexico, in 1971. Tim rolled his eyes at _Tulum_ : another magical location, Mexico's equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle or Salem. It had led to two expeditions to try and track them down, both so cursed that a third was cancelled. Hoffstetler’s final analysis set the seal on that. He described quantum influences, strange attractors, an endgame of chaos he didn't recommend.

There were profiles of persons of interest. Tim was surprised to see one of his mother, until he'd remembered that she'd said they talked to her. But she hadn't told him or his sister what she'd said. Elaine Strickland had admitted under interrogation that she’d been leaving her husband, abandoning him the morning she’d taken him and Tammy away. As a result, she’d been considered a possible conspirator, kept observed until her marriage to Ross. There was a mug shot of her, perfectly groomed but extremely tired, bruises shadowing her throat. This was what Tam had meant with her loaded _Not on us_ when Tim had claimed their father never laid a hand on them. Mom, damn it...why hadn't anybody told him?

Giles Dupont’s personal  file was as thick as Hoffstetler’s. Tam had been right. Giles really was gay: a ‘known bohemian’, arrested in a gay bar raid in the late ‘50s. There was a binder of his advertisements and press cuttings of his later fine art career, his harrowed face in an article about AIDS from the late ‘80s, talking about a lover. There was correspondence around that one, cold-hearted missives focusing on Giles keeping his face out of the media.

There were pictures. A full half box was security camera photos. These included ones his dad hadn’t cherry-picked for whatever he saw in Elisa, instead showing how Elisa and Zelda had been joined at the hip. Photos of the lab set up and surveillance of Hoffstetler. The Asset hadn’t photographed well. Photo attempts were dark, muddy, often blocked by the Asset itself curling away from the flash, pained. Tim knew the feeling.

There were more papers. A clipping of the official cover story, MISCEGNATION LEADS TO TRAGEDY, and records of the bribes and threats that had made it official. Reams of lab notes about the Asset. A copy of one of Hoffstetler’s old journals, intercepted by the CIA, with good drawings and Fabre quotes. Transcripts and correspondence from his father’s office. Dad’s secretary – damn, it was that Sally McGillicuddy –  had been meticulous, or subversive, or both. She'd typed up nearly everything Richard Strickland said at Occam. A conversation with Elisa and Zelda. _The Lord looks like me and you. Well_ _…a little more like me._ His later interrogation of the two cleaners together. _Interviewing the fucking help. The shit cleaners, the piss wipers._ No wonder Zelda had hated Tim on sight.

There was audio, interviews with Hoffstetler, Giles, and Zelda. Tim listened to a selection of each. Elisa’s co-conspirators had all been rattled, each claiming the whole thing had been their fault. An interview with a General C.W. Hoyt was sinister. A measured discussion of what made people obedient, expendable, ramped up into a rant. Hoyt wasn't blaming himself: he was blaming Strickland. Right at the peak of his fury, Hoyt gasped, rattled, choked. A woman said, "He's having a heart attack!" The tape descended into chaos. Tim added a note to his list of things to search online later, shut it off.

There was video. The video had been re-recorded from security camera tapes at some point, a little too late. Video decayed after twenty years, and this had been transferred onto VCR tapes in the '90s. By the time Tim had unearthed a TV and VCR, he was far from sure the video was worth it. The first few tapes were half static, dull surveillance content, until he found a tape that had something: Elisa.

Tim had been baffled by his father’s attraction to the woman until he saw Elisa move. Caught at work by the cameras, she was light on her feet, graceful. For a few seconds, Elisa out-and-out danced with a mop around her co-worker, Zelda, until Zelda smiled, shaking her head. Then the two women vanished around a corner. Huh. Tim flashed back to his first crush, another Baltimore dancer, on TV in black and white.

He tried a tape with a different labeling convention. It nearly gave Tim his own heart attack when it turned out to have sound. And a glimpse of his father. He rewound, set it up to play, and settled in.

_On the screen, there is an austere scene: a strange plinth, a concrete cross bound with chains, like a low altar. In front of this a black-and-white young Hoffstetler appears, his face whole, moving easily, peering into the camera._

_HOFFSTETLER: Is this_ _–_ _is this operational? Very good. We are here on September 19th, 1962, at Occam Aerospace Laboratory in the United States. We are recording video images of_ _–_ _of a creature known in some records as homo piscis: an amphibian man. There may be some fossil evidence of similar beings from the Devonian. However, what this camera captures is surely unique. The only one of its kind. Can someone please move the creature into position? You will note that the creature is bipedal. Can it be made to stand_ _–_

 _A man enters the camera'_ _s line of sight._

 _STRICKLAND: Hold your horses, Bob._ _–_ _jaw crunch- Need to finish here._

 _Tim'_ _s father, in shirtsleeves and a shit-eating grin, loads a final battery into a black rod: an extended cattle prod. Over his shirt, the leather straps of a pistol holster emphasize his shoulders. He stands too close for courtesy to Hoffstetler as he does this, looming over the scientist. With a confident spin, Strickland whirls the prod up, presses a button. There is an electric crackle, a flare of light._

 _STRICKLAND: Mph. Yes. That_ ' _s how I like it. We_ ' _ll get started._

Tim paused the playback to collect himself. Holy shit, Dad was young, there. In the video, Richard Strickland moved like Tam did, quick, hard, decisive. Tim pressed PLAY again.

_The black and white of his father ambles offscreen, but the man can still be heard. BANG, someone has kicked or struck metal, loud enough that Hoffstetler starts._

_STRICKLAND: Me again. Time to get out of your tuna can. Fucking pay attention, animal._

_Unseen, the electric crackle, and a scream. The scream is strangely muted, as if it vibrated through an extra vocal cord or two, then through waterlogged flesh._

_STRICKLAND: Stand. Stand, you damn idiotic lump of fish..._

_Crackles that lead to STATIC._

_HOFFSTETLER, over STATIC: I. I am sorry. T_ _he creature seems to have some magnetic energies that may be causing your camera trouble_ _–_ _can you adjust? A larger field of vision...I am sorry._

 _Sight returns. Strickland is captured with the cattle prod under the creature's_ _chin. Strickland and the creature are both in profile, both of a height. Wranglers to the side grapple the creature by gyves, by a collar. The creature is sleek, finned, glistening, alive with a thousand details that make the camera fritz and flicker. Its eyes are liquid. When it turns its wide-set, bewildered face to the camera Strickland fires the cattle prod._

 _More STATIC. Hoffstetler's_ _voice is mingled with its sound, but incomprehensible._

_An instant of clarity, like a frame from an old horror movie: on the concrete cross, a being cowers in pain, towered over by a dark, tormenting figure. It is the creature, kneeling on the plinth, trying to defend itself from Strickland. It is fluid, graceful as it kneels and shifts. As it moves, Strickland, distracted, jerks, stares, goes vague and slack._

_STRICKLAND, voice lower: Don't_ _you start again. Don't_ _you try. I know you know me. (electric crackle) Too damn much --_

_STATIC again over another watery SCREAM._

_HOFFSTETLER: Stop! Stop, I say_ _–_ _you'_ _ve injured your general's_ _Asset_ _–_ _are you satisfied now?_

 _STRICKLAND, roaring: You goddamn egghead, I'm_ _the one who'_ _s responsible for this monstrosity. I know what it can take._

 _The creature is jerked into position, arms back and bound, neck forward, chained down. Darkness streaks its side. Strickland gives the back of its shoulder a shock: it judders in misery. He steps beside it and runs his free hand, his left hand's_ _fingers, over the creature_ ' _s_ _head, with strange slowness, to pull the back of the collar. Strickland and the creature grimace alike when they touch each other. Strickland's hand traces the frills along the side of its throat, almost sensuous, his fingers starting to hook._

_STRICKLAND: Ever try this, Bob? This keeps it in line._

_HOFFSTETLER: Not its gills, the gills are extremely --_

_A piercing double SCREAM, human and inhuman, as some dark action between the three blurs the screen into STATIC, again and final._

The static continued. Tim watched for an instant, trying to trigger interdimensional entropy. Perversely, it didn’t come. He had to stagger over to a lab sink and vomit without any excuse beyond what he’d watched.

Tim found his face was wet. His breath’s rasping was a god-awful sound. Was this crying, after so long? Was he hurting, or angry? He remembered his own terrible innocence, a child with a knife and a lizard, mimicking far more than he knew. Felt his gut curdle at what he’d forgotten, those shouts and curses at home. He had what he’d wanted since his father had died. He knew what had really gone on. But each discovery had taken more from him than it gave. The space his father had left in his universe, a space that Tim had kept open, not giving anyone else a chance – his stepfather, coaches, teachers like Hoffstetler - that was going to stay an empty wound.

Despite that, Tim recognized his father’s sudden vagueness, that lost moment talking to the creature. He, too, had had his mind blown by the unknown. Richard Strickland had been failing to deal even before his hand injury. Tim wanted to yell at his father, shake his shoulders. Why the hell was he turned inside-out by a fish guy, someone literally his own size, when there were far worse things in the universe? Bad enough that he’d been a racist and a sadist, he’d been weak, too. What he’d told Tim not to be.

Tim grounded himself, as he had throughout the night, by returning to the copies of Giles' art. The art was the heart of it all. For Giles Dupont had done what Richard Strickland had failed to do: captured the creature for all time, body and soul.

There were forty-two pieces, a gallery exhibit’s worth, spread out over the steel tables like bodies. They ranged from charcoal portraits of the creature to massive finished drawings. There was a page covered in witty slice-of-life sketches, pairing a light-footed miss and the Asset. Except for that, only two drawings included a woman.

One was rough, a giant sketch of – not the creature with a woman in his arms. A woman, who had to be Elisa, holding the creature. The creature was dark, detailed, all shadow. In contrast, Elisa was a reverse silhouette, the barely-limned space of her arms and hands embracing the creature's shadows. The white void of her body vibrated with silent, blinding desire. Elisa’s one eye, peering over a monstrous shoulder, was fully drawn, creased and anxious. Tim thought she was asking for forgiveness.

The last artwork was refined, complete. Even the large-scale photocopy was a masterpiece. It had to be a fantasia, a vision of the pair embracing again. This Elisa was softer, lovelier than the skinny worker in past photographs, modest in some impossible fluid dress. The creature was the same lithe being Giles had captured before, but clear in every detail, picked out with small flashes like fireflies. The pair were caressed by a kelp forest. Giles could only have imagined this embrace, for it was underwater.

If Tim had only seen the last artwork, he might’ve bought it if somebody said it was a metaphor for something or other. But the sketch, the sorrowful eye... This was something Giles had seen with his own forgiving gaze. And valued enough to capture as sensual, sheltering, alight with meaning.

Tim went back to the persons of interest. Had Giles died of AIDS since the mid-90s? He hadn’t looked sick then. No. For all that his age was now in triple digits, older than Tim had thought all along, Giles Dupont was still alive and under observation. His address was still the same, Serpentine Avenue, Tuxedo Village, New York. His phone number hadn't changed since someone updated it with a typewriter.

Tim wrote the phone number on a Post-It and stuck it on top of his cell phone. He packed everything, checked the floor to see that nothing had slid astray. His heart was pounding his ribcage again.

On his way out the door, hauling the stash on a hand truck, Tim stopped. It took him two tries to change his desk phone’s voicemail message. “If we talked Thursday, I’ve got nothing. Literally, nothing. But try me. My cell is...” The line would be free. He wasn’t going to be using the cell phone for his next call.

Tim shoved himself and his burden through driving rain, into his car, up I-95. He refused to give up driving to the _rifts_ , though he’d downgraded himself to beaters, cheap older cars on their way out. His current one, a rusting black Ford Mustang, was a fast, rough drive. Halfway there, a rift crackled around him without warning. But it was past midnight on a highway. Tim kept the pedal to the metal, accelerating into the screaming-crawling-nihilist-static. When reality returned, a truck’s horn was screaming at him, but he’d cheated the void again. Blazing with adrenaline, he honked back and changed to the fast lane.

Half an hour later, Tim was coming down from that high, shaky as he pulled up to a diner in Maryland. Only his rotten luck would bring him to the only closed diner in the tri-state area. But it had what he needed outside, a pay phone. He slid into its grubby glass booth, started feeding it quarters. A pay phone was as close as anyone in the U.S. of A could get to making an untracked call. Tim was shit-sure Giles’ phone was still being tapped, and he was about to be seriously, prosecutably against protocol.

Someone picked up on the fourth ring. “Mister Dupont. Giles. Do you remember me?”

“It’s...it’s three in the morning.” Giles sounded afraid. There was the echo of a cat’s _mew_ in his background.

“Is it? Fuck. I lost track.”

“You...the son. Usually I’d... it’s not like I was sleeping well...a friend died recently. So... talk.”

“Zelda? I saw that. I saw it in the files. I got access to the files around my dad and you and...what the fuck?”

There was a pause. “I can’t really discuss this.”

Tim snapped, “I’m at a payphone. I’m nothing, nobody. This is the one time you can.”

Another pause. When Giles spoke, his voice ached with longing. “What do you think of the monster?”

Tim heard his voice shaking. “Which one? The fish guy? My dad? Because I have been watching my dad do some shit, let me tell you.”

Giles woke up. “What? How? What did you see?”

Tim told him about the video he’d watched. It took a while. Giles demanded every detail. At the end, Giles creaked, sounding his age. “Oh, Elisa. If she saw that too...no wonder. No wonder.”

“What did she say about it to you, when she pulled you in?” Tim might’ve read it, but he couldn’t remember. He was swamped.

“All she told me was that – ”

A nasal voice cut Giles off. “Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next three minutes.”

“Shit. Shit!” Tim crammed in more quarters, his dimes, his nickels.

“Hello?”

“Yeah. Back. Sorry.”

Giles continued. “The facts were that there was a fish-man locked up at Occam, tortured and dying. Elisa wanted to get it out. Apart from it being a federal crime on multiple levels, Elisa’s timing was terrible. I was busy.”

Tim spat, illogically furious, “Too busy? You were her dad!”

“Oh. I lied about that to the police. So they’d tell me what they were doing.”

“You never adopted Elisa?” A level of childishness stripped away from the Elisa that Tim had in his mind.

Giles said, bleakly, “No. But I should have. I should have done something. She was one of the best friends I’d ever had.”

Elisa realigned for Tim. “The woman who’s the gay guy’s best friend. From the shows, the movies.”

Giles laughed. “Absolutely! We saw all the movies!”

Something about this made Tim snap. “You could’ve said. You could’ve told us more. There are ways. You lied to me. Everybody has fucking lied to me all my life. I called you because – ”

Because of the empty wound, the waste and torture, small horrors and universe-vast ones, the story missing its ending. Because if Giles could give a woman wrapped naked around a walking fish some meaning, he could do that for Tim, too.

“Because you _know_ – ”

“Please deposit twenty-five cents.”

“FUCK!” Tim dropped the phone and turned his pockets inside-out. He was down to five pennies and a hundred-dollar bill.

Tim kicked the side of the booth. “Goddamn motherfucking shit-faced sons of bitches!” Cursing out everything, everyone that had kept him from what he knew now. Most of all, himself, his lifetime of mistakes.

When he had yelled it out, he put his forehead on the cold glass of the booth, bracing for his last option. Tim dialed a single zero. “Operator? I need to make a collect call.”

“May I ask who’s calling?” Tim gave his name, unthinking. It was all over to Giles, now.

“Hello.” Giles’ voice again, its worn soothing quality, like old leather. Tim’s vision blurred.

The operator sounded disdainful. “I have a collect call here from a Tim Strickland. Do you accept the charges?”

There was a buzzing, busy silence.

The operator prompted, “Sir?”

“I accept the charges.” Giles said it the same way he’d admitted his guilt in the tapes.

“Putting it through.”

Giles cleared his throat. “Is this a dream? I thought it wasn’t. But sometimes I talk to people in dreams. The next day, one way or another, I find they’ve called collect.”

Tim shuddered, picturing dreams of the dead. “I’ll, uh, pay you back.”

Giles observed, “Do you know, now that Zelda’s dead, talking to you is as close as I can get to talking to Elisa. Outside my dreams.”

“Yeah, but I talk back – ”

Giles was amused. “You certainly do. But it’s like, it’s very like. You see, I thought I knew more than she did. The professor to Eliza Doolittle. It’s very soothing to a man on the outs, admiring eyes. Someone to listen. A little power. But this game has its end, I’ve learned. Elisa was so much wiser than me. And you’re a persistent bastard, like your father.” Tim remained empty at that.

Giles went on, tranquil. “I lied to you, yes. All these sins of omission. As I’ve said before, it wasn’t personal. I have been lying my entire life, to stay alive, one way or another.”

Tim curled over the receiver. “I lied to you too. I didn’t tell you what happened to – your friend. Your friend whose funeral we were both at. Look. Anyone listening in knows I’m talking to you. So...how about...you tell me some stuff...and I tell you some, too.”

“What would you like to know?” Giles asked.

“Uh...I listened to a little of the tapes. You said that Elisa talked you ‘round. But not much of, uh, how.”

“Ah, yes. I didn't think they'd believe me. It was so elemental. Elisa helped the creature for love. And we helped her do it for the same reason. If we hadn’t...we wouldn’t be human.”

Tim was tired enough to feel loose. He threw out there, “Were they fucking?”

“After all that fuss, I'd have been disappointed if they didn't.” Tim barked with shocked laughter. Giles joined him, then added, “It happened later, while we had him in hiding. Nothing I could do, none of my art, shows how beautiful the creature is in person. Just captivating! He truly is a god. But for the two of them, coming together like that was part of the love. They were so in love. Right before your father shot them, they were signing to each other. Wanting to be together.”

“You’re saying that’s why Elisa did what she did. Threw her life away.” It had been a massive fuck you to her entire world. The kind he’d never dared.

Giles mused, “How much of a life, really? At the time, she and I, were a pair of nothings. Through what she did, I saw what she truly was. A princess without a voice. And that it was worth it, to love and be human, even with the suffering around it.”

“Even when the beloved is more than human. Trust me: that creature truly is a god. He transformed my world as surely as he did Elisa’s. If I told you more about it…what would I say? That they lived happily ever after? I believe they did... That they were in love - that they remained in love? I’m sure that is true... ”

Tim tapped the glass, impatient. “Why do you talk about them like it’s some fractured fairy tale?”

“How else do we talk about these things? About love, fear, enchantment? We don’t know. We’ve lost our language for the marvelous. But it remains part of our world. Perhaps we forgot about it for a while, but it’s back. We need to find out how to tell these stories again to stay sane.”

Tim recalled his last, halting conversation with his father: _a man does what he has to to survive._ Dad’s mutters from that time, about animals and savagery and the jungle. A shadow his father hadn’t shed because, maybe, he’d never known how.

Tim didn’t know, either. But he owed Giles a story. “Should tell you what happened to Hoffstetler. It kind of – it’s one of those things.”

“The magical? The marvelous?”

“More like the opposite of that.”

For the first time in his life, Tim parsed out the entire series of events, the real one. Dimitri’s asides, Tim’s attempts to get him to open up, the drugs and the science hall. Giles kept interrupting. “Oh my goodness. That was Dimitri at his absolute worst. I shouldn’t laugh. He could be very frustrating sometimes. I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall!”

“He was trying to hate me but I could tell it was _work_ , y’know?”

Again, they both laughed. Giles repeated, “That was Dimitri all over.”

Giles made Tim tell the story of the cataclysmic portal twice, especially what Hoffstetler had done, signing with his hands, his final shout. The loss and Tim's unwanted gain. At the end of the second round, Giles asked, “Did Dimitri _want_ to go? Through the portal, I mean.”

“I have no idea.” Tim hadn’t imagined that. Not for one second.

Giles was exultant. “It would be such an adventure for him, if he did. A new world, meeting aliens, getting away from America. Dimitri was so fed up, not a Reagan fan. Either way, you didn’t see him die! Not lost, but gone before! Beings like that, they could do amazing things. Dimitri could still be alive out there.”

Tim darkened. “He could be in hell.”

Giles seemed to shrug this off. “If I had the chance to see another dimension, I’d certainly be curious. Well, curious now, maybe not in '62. What’s bad about those glimpses you get? The, what did you call them, rifts?”

“They don’t make sense. They open up whenever. What opens, it’s not a real dimension, it’s whatever’s between. This hell static, the sight and the noise of it. A full void, if that makes sense. But...there’s a force behind it. Not a mind. Not a god. Waiting for everything to be unmade. Undone. Whatever it is, I’m a bug, a germ, _nothing_ compared to it.” None of them were.

“Heavens. Do you drink a lot? I would.” Giles said it lightly, giving it the same classy turn Sarah would.

Tim gritted, “I haven’t had a drink in seventeen fucking years. It makes the rifts worse.”

“You poor boy.” Giles sighed. “I don’t drink like I used to, but that’s another story. Since the creature and Elisa, I live and I paint. Always with a sense of _something_. After what you say, I almost think it’s the counterpart to your nothing. Perhaps they balance each other out.”

The double idea, of both Hoffstetler and something else still in the universe, was – Tim wanted to say it was too good to be true. Yet Giles sounded so convinced.

A silence extended, but a comfortable one. A pause before they each went back to their own, secretly strange, worlds.  Tim broke it to repeat, “I’ll pay you back for the call.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I have to do something, I – hey.” Tim smacked the booth’s glass again, inspired. “Want me to see what I can do about your art? Get it back for you.”

Giles choked. “You can do that?”

“Can try,” Tim said, gruffly. “If I’m not fired after tonight. I’m not an archives expert, but for evidence...”

They spent another half hour talking about it, ten more minutes saying goodbye. Giles wrapped it up with, “More au revoir, if I’ll be in touch with you about my art. Try to call at three in the afternoon next time? All this late-night action. So very like what happened, forty-four years ago.” Giles hung up.

Tim put the receiver down. His ear ached. He’d been in the phone booth for so long that it had steamed up from his body heat, though he himself was going numb from the cold. He took out his cell phone and checked the time. Six in the morning, the Saturday of a long weekend. If his call to Giles didn't slip through surveillance cracks (the small hours on a holiday weekend, it might), he had a while before the shit hit the fan. He selected a contact. In his light-headed state, there was only one call to make.

“Sarah. It’s me. Not an emergency emergency, it’s – How am I?” Tim slumped, suddenly boneless, against the side of the booth. “I...am...fucked up. But okay. Yeah, both. Uh, did I wake you? You by yourself?”

“Not flattery. You’re the one who told me about internet dating.”

“No, I’m not drunk. Second person to ask, though. I got my hands on the files around my dad. His last case. Yeah, that woman. All. Is. Revealed.”

“It’s wild. A trip. There’s this marine part – this creature - you gotta see this. You out of anybody. I have it all in my car. I sound like a kid? I _feel_ like a kid. Can you meet me here? Elk Diner, Elkridge. I’ll buy you breakfast. Two breakfasts. Ten breakfasts.”

“Well, uh, I haven’t slept. Probably shouldn’t drive. But I need to hear what you think.” He swallowed. “Please.”

Tim levered upright at her reply. “Thanks. Ten breakfasts. I promise. See you soon.” He closed his phone. He’d see what Sarah said to it all. The creature, and Mom being an FBI suspect along with a famous-ish gay artist, and the rifts. With the files to back him up, the rifts would, for once, be believable.

If Sarah could see that sketch, look that Elisa in her eye, and be forgiving, then...maybe there was something else to talk about, too. How? Apologize for any shadow she’d sensed, for being a freak all these years? Try a page from Giles’ fairy-tale take? Both, maybe. And leave the story’s ending up to her.  

Behind him, the diner’s lights flicked on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the _Hellboy_ comics there are several stories published between 2004 - 2006 around Lovecraftian eldritch frog monsters - I was thinking of the _Black Flame_ storyline in particular. Throw this into the Guillermo-verse blender and this story has a reason for the files around the Asset to be scrutinized - and for some people out there to be very desperate for any leads.
> 
> The video clip Tim watches is the immediate precursor to Strickland getting his fingers bitten off by the Asset.
> 
> Two other shorts that follow on from this chapter - [The Brewster Test](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405238/edit), how things were going in (ahem) Baltimore twenty-four hours later, and [Unholy Word](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405238/chapters/33451350), a little horror and Hellboy crossover to get Tim back to work on Tuesday.


	7. 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2017 – Tim Strickland asks Giles Dupont: _why are you still here?_ And Giles answers.

Tim Strickland had managed to salvage one thing from what the interns called the trash fire of 2017.

He walked Giles Dupont to the FBI’s main Evidence office to get his art back.

Giles went in. Tim waited in the hallway, grilled every five minutes by zealous guards. This new administration was fucked up beyond belief. He half-wanted to retire. Sixty-three was ancient at the FBI. Still, all locations of his branch of Forensics were busier than ever. Lots of _situations_. He might as well stick around where he found out what was really happening.

The world was pretty much going to shit. If the Occam disaster had happened today, it wouldn't rate a park or a memorial ceremony. That sort of thing was business as usual, now. Supers’ battles were escalating. Paranormal incidents, once suppressed, made the news. While government budgets were slashed, wildfires and flooding spread. Last Christmas, he and Sarah had tried to get away from it all, going diving in Australia. It was one of her bucket list things, seeing the Great Barrier Reef. But she had cried in his arms every night about the reef damage and the weird, sterile sea swamped with jellyfish.

The two of them traveled a lot around the holidays. _You got together with your stepsister? Your stepbrother?_ kind of killed Christmas dinners with the family. Tim was fine swapping that for the sheer animal pleasure of waking up next to his person every day. Tam, blazing with rage, had disowned him for a few weeks. Until she'd had her own encounter with the blood and dark water around their father. But that was another story. Giles had taken it in stride. Any qualms he had went down to the chance to get his art back and to ask someone with a marine biology background all the questions he wanted. He and Sarah got along like, well, like something on fire.

Someone went by in a black-and-white houndstooth coat. Tim’s reality warped around the edges. He’d fallen into bargaining with the monstrous void. Right now, he asked it to let him have this. Just let him get through another two, two and a half hours before doing its thing. Somehow, Tim had never been hit by a _rift_ while Giles was around. That was a shred of dignity he wanted to keep. This time, the sense of waiting existential doom subsided. 

It had taken a decade to get Giles his art back, fighting The Man one day, parlaying government insider status the next. They'd had a setback at the fifty-year mark of the case in 2012. The files were, unusually, not declassified. But they’d prevailed. Sarah had said, “You’re going to be smug about this for the rest of your life, aren’t you?” Damn right he was.

Giles came out of Archives pale, eyes unnaturally bright, awkwardly hugging a portfolio as huge as a manta ray. “I’ve got it. Them. The pictures. Let’s go, shall we? I don’t want them to change their minds.”

As they left the decaying building, Tim said, “I can do lunch. What kind of food?”

“Something on an actual plate. None of those quinoa avocados in a bowl. A lunch counter at the train station would be fine.”

“Got just the place.” Tim knew Union Station in DC like the back of his hand, though he was based in Baltimore now. Transferring had been a step down from the main FBI lab. But Sarah remained married to her work at the National Aquarium, and it was easier to work from the Baltimore office without a car. Tim had hated giving up driving, but the _rifts_ hadn't given him up. He'd decided he didn't want to find out what happened if he died during a rift.

Tim held out for an old-school cab, not Uber or Lyft, paid the fare in cash. At midday, the security-line scan to get into the station wasn't bad. Once inside, they hogged a booth for four at a faux-diner. Ordering took a few taps on a tablet. Giles was apt at this, but he grumbled anyway. “Online this, online that. And only pictures or logos! Some of us can actually read...when is everything going to go back offline?”

Tim thought about grim forecast reports he’d seen. “About ten years.”

“Oh? Good. Will we get egg salad sandwiches back, too?”

“Hey, if we’d gone to the place with the quinoa avocado bowls...” _While we can_ , Tim thought. He agreed with the reports. Sarah reinforced them from the science-and-climate-change side. It was both depressing and a relief, one more thing he didn't lie about to her.

The end of the world was swept away by Giles opening up his portfolio. Tim leaned in to see Giles’ artwork of Elisa and the creature. Giles paged through them slowly, plenty of time for Tim to see. The originals were far more powerful than the copies. They practically vibrated under Giles’ hands, alive in some unseen dimension. For all that they were black and white, they felt like the vital opposite of the busy void.

The last image in the folder was the embrace. The one that wasn’t a metaphor for anything. It was the first time Tim had seen it in color. There was a teal wash behind it, giving it soothing, natural depth. Tim drank it in the way he’d stared at favorite pictures as a fascinated teen, a wondering child. Giles looked beyond their table and flipped the folder shut.

The server had arrived with their drinks. He ignored Tim, in an FBI-issue windbreaker and slacks, to fawn over Giles, dapper with his crisp haircut and subtly hued tailoring. Giles smiled wryly. After the young man left, Giles lifted his lime seltzer to Tim. “I can’t thank you enough for this. Paperwork isn’t _me._ _”_

“Sorry it took so long. Can't believe the fuckers spent a year moving the art around so you could pick it up today.” Tim reached for a straw, then remembered he shouldn’t: ocean ecology, single-use plastic. With today wrapped, he wouldn’t care about not ending the world any sooner if it wasn’t for Sarah. Giles might have his own reasons to care.

“Having this,” Giles stroked the portfolio, “Makes me feel young again. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to having them back.”

Tim made some noncommittal noises, then asked Giles what he hadn’t dared to before. As if this man, the last link to Tim’s past, was a wizard from a fairy tale, a dream, and to break the tale’s logic was to bring it to an end. “Why are you still here?”

Giles twinkled, “I never say no to a lunch date with an agreeable man. I’ll be taking the train back when we're done. Driving and me, nowadays – ”

“Yeah, same here. I mean...alive. Healthy. Related to this?” Tim tapped the portfolio.

“Mmmmmmyes.”

Tim tried a different tack, one from the good cop-bad cop FBI days. He eased up, glanced around. “This as good as diners were in 1962?”

“They were shit, actually. Anything’s better. But I like this whole train station. It’s from my time. You see, pieces of my world are around me, but less and less every year. It’s why I like living up in Tuxedo. That place is embalmed.”

Still glancing away, Tim murmured, “How old are you?”

Giles mused, “I enjoyed the seventies. The eighties, not so much. The Obama administration agreed with me, too. It all changes so fast. It feels like the thirties again, now. The nineteen thirties, the hard years. It’s like I found my time, to outlive it yet again.”

Tim stayed patient. Giles liked to ramble. He restored eye contact, not blinking, knowing his mismatched eyes were unsettling.

Giles squirmed. “I’m a hundred and eighteen years old now.”

Tim stared across the table at the man who appeared to be the same age as him. Younger, maybe: Tim's hair was pewter-gray. “Fuck.”

Giles couldn’t help twinkling again at that. “I kept it off the record, tried faking a few IDs, but once the people like you had a clue, I was outed.”  

Tim didn’t have to ask how. Giles was overflowing. Tim leaned in to hear his urgent half-whispers, his relief at being busted. “Back in ’62, the creature injured me. Slashed me with his claws. He didn’t mean to. And afterwards, he healed me. More than I knew at the time.”

“Healed you?” Tim echoed.

“When he did it, I didn’t feel anything. The creature put his hands on my arm and my head. He lit up a little as he did, the way some fish do. Two days later, I thought I just had a cleaned-up arm and new hair and more spring in my, uh, step.”

“Two weeks later, when Elisa and the creature were gone and the Cuban crisis had us on the brink of nuclear war and I was getting grilled by federal authorities, I realized I hadn’t wanted a drink the entire time. When I usually would’ve hit the bottle.” Giles pointed to his head. “He did something _up here_ besides the hair. But I don’t know what.”

“As for the rest, it took me years to really catch on. I thought I was just...happy.” Giles sighed deeply, gazing into the past. “At the time, when he had his hands on me, I’d told the creature, ‘That’s enough.’ So he stopped. _I didn_ _’_ _t know._ I didn’t know he was trying to fix everything I feared. Age. Sickness. Death. I wonder what he would’ve done if I hadn’t said that. I could have a young face to go along with...all this.”

Tim rewound. “About you. Do people realize? Besides me.”

“I’m afraid the powers that be have noticed.  They haul me in every year, scan me with things I never imagined I’d see. I’ve been advised I ought to," Giles made finger quotes, "die, change identities. Move house, as well.”

Tim hinted, “Get yourself a nice place in some real countryside. Big garden, off the grid. Secure.”

Giles frowned. “Forgive my lack of enthusiasm. I loathe packing.”

“Your art will go up in value if you’re dead,” Tim said.

Giles perked up. “That will help. And I’m planning another name change. Something butch!”

“You have friends? People looking out for you?” Tim paused, then just said it. “Cause I should’ve stopped smoking way sooner. Figure I've got ten more years.” The same as Western society, if he was lucky.

Giles protested, “I can’t believe it. You seem, why, fifty-seven. Fifty-one. Younger, even.”

“Liar," Tim said. "I'm sixty-three."

“The same age I was back in '62. Do you know, when I meet someone and they’re young, they’re that age to me forever.”

There was something to that. Sarah was a year younger than Tim was, but looking at her, he saw the girl who’d turned him inside-out years ago. He added, “Same when you meet someone and they’re old. They’re an old person, that’s it. Probably helped you stay on the down low for so long.”

“Is there any ice left in your drink? I need some for my burn after that.” Giles smiled at his own wit. “Truly, I feel like the same person, inside. I don’t know where the time goes.”

Tim asked something that would have been impossible to the nineteen-year-old who’d first met Giles. “Do you want to die? Really die?”

Giles went silent at that. He re-opened the portfolio. Compared to the flickering images on screens and tablets around them, the black charcoal drawings could have come from a Renaissance studio. Or a Paleolithic cave wall. Finally, he said, “I am very, very tired. But I think I’ll try to keep going.”

“Why?”

“If Dimitri returns, from his otherwhere and his aliens, I’d like to be here. It would be good if someone was. Besides, I feel that...” Giles paged to the the biggest, most dramatic image in the portfolio. The blue-tinted embrace, the fairy-tale take on Elisa and her beloved creature. “If I’m still going... _they_ are, too. Somewhere. And this tarnished old world still has some beauty in it. Some magic.” He gave Tim a shrewd look. “If you, of all people, can see that...perhaps I’ve got a calling to go on with.”

Tim did not reply. After his life, the idea of _not_ dying was what gave him the chill of the void.

Giles nattered on, anxious. “You do see it, don’t you? That they’re still alive out there? You’re the first I’ve told in, oh, ages.” Tim finally put what he meant together. That Giles spoke about Elisa like she was still alive. That the creature had healed Giles. That the creature, so long ago, had taken Elisa, the woman he loved, and might have fixed everything. Including death.

“I believe you. I have seen some shit. And I keep secrets.” About crimes and their aftermaths. What he’d done and wanted to do. What his father had done, letting a chance at healing, immortal life, transcendent love slip through his cruel hands.

Tim let his fingertips rest on the portfolio. “The way I see it, I owe the guy in here for a couple of things. What he’s got, what he gave you... and maybe Elisa... I don’t think the rest of us deserve it." He met Giles' eyes again. "I really don’t.”

Giles put his hand over Tim’s. “Maybe we will in time.”

Before Tim could respond outside his doom-and-gloom default, Giles lifted his hand and went on. “I mean, look at this. I just held hands with a man in a diner and it was fine! The world can change for the better.”

Tim managed a smile. “It’s nothing, now. Maybe I get one diversity point or something.”

“Ah, but back in 1962...” Giles went on about those days for a while. It was the same thing agents and crime victims did, to reassure themselves they’d survived. They ordered some god-awful coffee, lingering until they couldn't avoid being done.

They went back to the historic main hall of the station, the white ceiling's arcs and details touched with gilding, its vast floor of white tile picked out with black details. Giles was on Amtrak. Tim was on the Baltimore commuter line. They needed to go separate ways. “Uh, got something for you.” Tim took out a small standard envelope. “Stay in touch off the grid if you want. This has a PO box for us and my Signal ID, that’s a secure messaging system. Plus a ProtonMail address, that’s secure-ish email. Secure as it gets. I don't trust anything these days.” That went down to the bone. He'd left his pistol at home today, felt naked without it.

“I understand the PO box part. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.” Giles grinned. “Who knows? I might call you at 3 AM for a little revenge.”

“I’ll pick up,” Tim said, gruffly. He knew he was crap at goodbyes. Whatever happened next was somewhere between a handshake and a hand-hold, how men used to be and how they were now. Then Giles slid out of it with a wave and another smile, on his way.

Tim watched Giles head towards his track, framed by the magnificent hall, its geometries of white and gold, white and black. With an art portfolio back in his hand, Giles had a rakish swing to his step that set his pale trench coat flaring. He was the image of a modern man, when modern was in the past, now. He’d be around to make it the future again if that was what he wanted.

Preserved by what powers? The magic of true love? Whatever had kindled in those early 60s years? Quantum – something – the strange attractor – the unknown – here it was, right on schedule, a rift shrinking Tim's field of vision -

 _the static the void the awful chaos devouring the place the people the man, sealing over Giles'_ _black portfolio with a universal jitter, all white all black all white then back, the inevitable static like falling snow, lines like rain, shaped like water, swirling into fractals, finding attraction, on the cusp of beauty spiraling growing and_ _–_

The one time Tim wanted to see, the rift closed.

He swayed as he stood, thunderstruck. Meaning at last, if he could understand it. That might take the rest of his life.

Tim checked his pockets for his wallet and tech. Still there, like Giles. Around him, heedless, mundane life rolled through the train station. It was his father's America. Flags, expensive stores, a pair of cops hustling someone along, anti-terrorism guards with their rifles, NORTH KOREA NUKE THREAT the headline in front of Hudson News. Humanity’s downwards spiral continuing around them all. Clearing the way for whatever - whoever - might come next.

 _If I_ ' _m still going...they are, too._

It was too late to race after Giles and ask if that was really a good thing.  


	8. 'Art Book' Bios for Tim and Tam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Shape of Water_ art book has detailed bios for several characters - Giles, Dimitri, and Zelda. I put together some art book-style bios for my take on Strickland's children as adults.

### Tim Strickland

 _We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten_. – Kurt Vonnegut

DATE OF BIRTH: In Jacksonville, FL. October 30th 1954.

SIGN: Scorpio.

RULING PLANET: Pluto.

AGE: 8 at the time of _The Shape of Water_ ; 52 in 2006.

PARENTS: Richard Strickland and Elaine Caldwell Strickland.

RESIDENCE:  2006 - Depressing condominium in Alexandria, VA.

POSITIVES: Curious, good manners, loyal, enthusiastic, perceptive, relaxed, determined.

NEGATIVES: Moody, self-centered, paranoid/superstitious, stubborn, easily swayed by authority, bullying streak, little sense of humor.

SECRET DREAMS: Would have liked to live a normal life.

PROFESSION: Former FBI special agent, currently in FBI Evidence Response forensics.

LIKES: Fast cars. Road trips. Gadgets. Having a few close friends. Natural history museums. Pizza, burgers, clam shacks. When drinking, rum drinks or beer. Lots of ice in drinks. Very small and very large animals. Greatest hits of the 70s. Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Crumb, George R.R. Martin, science magazines. Horror movies. Swimming, diving, lifting weights. Lacrosse. Handguns. Wearing a favorite leather jacket until it disintegrates. Seasonal pleasures: beaches, freshly mown grass, autumn leaves, snow. Curvy women, rough-edged amateur porn.

DISLIKES: Formal dinners. Skiing, tennis, golf. Public transport. Dogs. Canned vegetables. Hangovers and the aftermath of psychiatric drugs. Buzz cuts. Irritating fabrics - corduroy, polyester, tweed. Wearing colorful clothing. Bossy relatives. Every goddamn CSI-themed TV show. Doing assigned reading. Playboy and Penthouse (those chicks look like his mom). Sexual scenarios that evoke his more disturbing FBI agent jobs. Eldritch interdimensional phenomena.

SOME RANDOM THINGS: College was all about swim team: changed his last name back to his father's at age 20: keeps track of the news about superheroes/paranormal phenomena: wears his pistol inside his waistband: reads a lot during his asocial phases.

MOST HAPPY IF: Doing something athletic, outdoors, in the water, or in bed.

PRESENT LOVE INTEREST: Carries a torch for Sarah Winthrop Glasscock – his stepsister.

VIEWS HIMSELF AS: Protective. Unlucky, a loser, a freak. Trying, damn it.

IS VIEWED AS: Brash. Entitled. Down-to-earth, can tip over into crass or gross. Moody teen, douchebag 20-something, intense/disturbing from 30 onwards. Eerily good at his job. Miskatonic University Class of ’75 “Most Likely To Arrest You All.”

 

### Tammy Strickland (later Tamara Caldwell)

 _When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow._ – Ursula Le Guin

DATE OF BIRTH: In Jacksonville, FL. November 17th 1952.

SIGN: Sagittarius.

RULING PLANET: Jupiter.

AGE: 10 at the time of _The Shape of Water_ ; 53 in 2006.

PARENTS: Richard Strickland and Elaine Caldwell Strickland.

RESIDENCE: Airy hillside home near San Jacinto, California.

POSITIVES: Affectionate, articulate, energetic, intellectual, an idealist, a leader, eye for style and beauty.

NEGATIVES: Quick to anger, self-centered, judgmental, defensive, stubborn, ruthless, little sense of humor.

SECRET DREAM: That, to complete her rich and full life, she may yet have a transcendental encounter with the divine.

PROFESSION: Consulting archaeologist focusing on high-risk sites and ethical resource management. 

LIKES: ‘Chosen family’ friends. Soft chambray. New sneakers. Dogs. Animals in general. Green tea. Espresso. Buttery white wines. Lemon-flavored anything. The occasional toke/pot brownie. Mountains, climbing up, enjoying views, skiing down. Mesopotamian and Greek/Roman classical studies. Travel to Europe and Asia. Beautiful antiques. Making lists. Greatest hits of the 70s 80s and 90s. Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, Ursula Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien. Tamara de Lempicka. Running, lifting weights. Lacrosse. Fencing. Aikido. Krav Maga. The sparkle of a new infatuation.    

DISLIKES: Male chauvinist pigs. Wearing rings or high heels. Red meat, pork, and crustaceans. Long flat hikes. Sad neighborhoods. Getting stuck in traffic. New Age hucksters. Grimy kitchens. Humidity. Anything _Indiana Jones_. Movies/books where one of the lesbian lovers dies. The repulsively visceral – slime, blood, gore, insects, decay. Porn of all kinds.

SOME RANDOM THINGS: Was in a coven in college: changed her name to her mother's maiden name when she was 22: speaks four languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, German): Tim has taught her how to shoot: so out as a lesbian that she was on the cover of _The Advocate_ in 1998.

MOST HAPPY IF: Achieving something. Having one of her ‘chosen family’ groups around her.

PRESENT LOVE INTEREST: Her primary lover since late 1984, Hosna Al-Hazred.

VIEWS HERSELF AS: A strong woman, hard working, using her privileges for good causes, enjoying life.

IS VIEWED AS: Intimidating, admirable, humorless, a role model, a golden girl all her life, lucky. Overdue for a comeuppance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was asked several times, "Is Tim going to be a serial killer in your story?" For me this possibility got derailed by Elaine's implied happy ending in the novel. I fleshed out one take on a happy ending for Elaine here - well-loved, no money worries, supported and admired, doing what she wants and raising children with her values. Not the most radical happy ending but, gosh, I wanted to give Elaine a break! For me, SerialKiller!Tim would have been much more likely _if Strickland himself had lived_ and been more of an influence on Tim. There's no way that could have gone well.
> 
> In the book Tammy's a solid little girl who's very much on her mother's wavelength. In the movie, she seems very fed up and is a touch taller than her brother. In the original script there's a scene where she rolls her eyes at her parents and snaps something like, "We can spell, Mom." So my headcanon has Tammy as the older sibling, with the same resilience Elaine shows, and like Elaine processing and moving on pretty briskly.


End file.
